Smashing Magazine

New EU guidelines, why AI sparkles aren’t enough, when AI labels are required, and what the rules mean for AI-powered features and products. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **frie...

When tasked with building a highly interactive, tactile web experience, the architecture must serve the art direction. In this article, Alexey Kopytin explains their architectural rationale for buildi...

The gap between “you need a library for this” and “the browser does this” keeps closing. A practical guide to auditing your dependencies and finding what the web platform can now handle for you.

Whether you’re enjoying some well-earned time off this August or are jumping headfirst into a new project, how about some new desktop wallpapers to accompany you on all those big and small adventures...

As AI reshapes product design, it could give designers greater autonomy or expose the gaps that autonomy makes harder to hide. Exploring both the bull and bear cases, Andy Budd examines what happens w...

Many of the AI tools we interact with take the form of text boxes. But what if there was a different way to interact with AI? Oleksii Hrzhehorzhevskyi explores a different approach to creating a new A...

While React Server Components rely on the custom Flight protocol to stream interactive UIs, this same mechanism introduces powerful deserialization sinks that attackers can exploit. Durgesh Pawar brea...

The common rule of thumb is to never “block” the browser’s main thread when running JavaScript tasks. But is this a hard rule? Victor Ayomipo describes a use case he encountered involving a screenshot...

Many companies assume everyone craves new AI features. But the reality is that most people don't want more AI — at least not in the way most AI leaders envision it. Brought to you by Design Patt...

The strongest visual concepts don’t start in Figma. They start with the right questions. Explore the pre-concept phase of brand identity design, where teams research brand context, uncover hidden assu...

Many UI trends are designed to capture attention and signal innovation, but those goals often conflict with the needs of mental health apps: reducing cognitive strain, fostering trust, and providing a...

We have been building websites inside boxes for years on WordPress. Let’s take a closer look at [Kirki](https://kirki.com/), the first freeform visual builder with an infinite canvas, and explore how...

A closer look at why users don’t need more tools in their daily lives. What they need are seamless integrations of useful features to match already existing, established mental models. Brought to you...

We’ve fallen into conversational tunnel vision, defaulting every AI capability into a chat-based interface simply because LLMs are trained on dialogue data. But great UX is about matching modality to...

Teams can generate UI faster than ever, but they still have to guarantee that what they ship is usable, secure, and maintainable. Accessibility as an operational capability rather than a compliance ch...

July is just around the corner, and that means... It’s time for some new desktop wallpapers! As every month, the wallpapers in this collection were created by the community for the community and can b...

In a world where AI is informing more design choices, it’s easy to mistake predictions for certainties. This article introduces Probabilistic Design, a mindset that allows UX and product teams to acce...

We have officially moved past the era of humanoid robots as mere public relations stunts. As they become increasingly lifelike, society may soon face profound social, psychological, and ethical challe...

Findings from an exploratory user research study highlighting the unique insights and practical UX recommendations shared by participants with cognitive disabilities.

Practical guide on how to reduce drifts, minimize mistakes, maintain context, and improve the quality of AI-generated prototypes. Brought to you by Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, **friendly video...

Let’s kick off June — and the beginning of summer — with some fresh inspiration! Artists and designers from across the globe once again tickled their creativity to welcome the new month with a new col...

Seventy percent of websites still fail basic WCAG contrast checks in 2025. After years of design system tooling, accessibility linters, and JavaScript libraries, nothing moved the needle. We didn’t ne...

There’s a moment in almost every usability session where a participant pauses at the login screen, types something, and glances up: checking whether they’re “doing it right.” That pause is a clear sig...

What people say, feel, think, and do are often very different things. To understand the underlying reasons for user behavior, it helps to look beyond the surface and explore hidden motivations, root c...

Meet `sibling-index()` and `sibling-count()`. Staggered cascade effect in one line of CSS without `:nth-child()` rules or JS workarounds. Works for 5 items or 5,000.

Every extra second of friction has a measurable business cost. Carrie Webster shares ten data-backed UX facts that link user experience directly to revenue, retention, and long-term growth.