Web Design - Newslocker

Embracing Playful Imperfection With The CSS `random()` Function

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0200

In design, we love spending hours obsessing over consistency, grids, and alignment. But when I heard that the native CSS random() function landed in Safari and is rolling out in Chrome 156, I started wondering: where does randomness actually make sense on the web? Is it something we want in our design system? To find out, I did what I always do in doubt: I built a bunch of playful CodePen demos exploring organic typography, bouncing letters, splayed cards, and a punk fanzine.
As someone who love

Is Your Organization Messing Up AI Adoption?

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0200

The way I see most organizations roll out AI feels more like a farce than a strategy. If it were turned into a movie, reviewers would say it was unbelievable. Nobody could be that stupid.
Yet here we are. And what makes it all the more frustrating is that we have been here before.
Back in 2014, I wrote a book for Smashing Magazine called Digital Adaptation, looking at the mistakes being made in how organizations were approaching digital transformation and what they should be doing instead. The s

A Practical Guide To Naming Things

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Naming is hard. The language we use shapes the way we think about things, but also the conversation we have about it. That’s why we have so much confusion about colors, icons, UI components, features — and that’s why we struggle to name design tokens, HTML classes, and variables.
Sometimes, the names we choose are too generic, so it’s difficult to understand what exactly is meant. And sometimes they are too specific, leaving little room for flexibility and reuse. How do w

Under Autumn’s Spell (October 2026 Wallpapers Edition)

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:30:00 +0200

Misty mornings, leaves shining in bright red, yellow, and orange hues, and spooky creatures making an appearance — October has a very special charm. So, how about some new desktop wallpapers to celebrate October’s beauty, and the upcoming Halloween season, of course? Well, we’ve got you covered.Just like it has been a monthly tradition here at Smashing Magazine for more than 15 years already, the wallpapers in this post were created by artists and designers from across the glob

Stop Treating CSS Container Queries Like Traditional Media Queries

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0200

To be completely honest with you, I missed the news when CSS Container Queries first shipped. And when I finally heard about it, my very first thought was, “Why exactly do I need this when media queries already exist?”
I’m not proud of that reaction, knowing what I know now, but it was comforting to know that I wasn’t alone. In fact, there are legions of us out there.
What baffles me is that container queries aren’t a new feature, as it currently sits at around 94%

Building A UX ROI Case That Survives The Boardroom

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0200

Sooner or later, a CFO looks at your wireframes and asks what any of it actually does for the bottom line. Storyboards don’t answer that question, and the era when a 5-minute pitch could answer it ended, unfortunately, a while ago.
These days, if you want to win budget, buy-in, and backing for UX, the design has to be provably good for the business, not only for the people using it.
And proving that takes more than taping a dollar sign to a redesign. You have to understand how your organiz

The Death Of The Button: Why The Best Interface Is No Interface

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Ever since the commercialisation of the Graphical User Interface pioneered by systems like the Xerox Star and popularised by the original Apple Macintosh, software has relied heavily on point-and-click interactions. If you wanted to book a trip, buy a pair of shoes, or research a health symptom, you were expected to navigate a labyrinth of user interfaces. You click menus, adjust range sliders, fill out multi-step forms, deal with cookie pop-ups, and open dozens of browser tabs just to cross-ref

The Many Faces Of September (2026 Wallpapers Edition)

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0200

For more than 15 years already, our monthly wallpapers series has been the perfect opportunity for creatives of all backgrounds to put their skills to the test. You don’t have to meet stakeholder or client requirements; for a change, it’s just you, exploring your ideas and bringing them to life in your own, unique style. Since we first embarked on this wallpapers journey, so many talented folks from all across the globe have accepted the challenge, and this September is no exception.

Rethinking Data Visualisation: A UX Approach To Dashboards That Actually Drives Decisions

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0200

In organisations today, data has never been more available. Dashboards and performance decks exist for almost every function — sales, product, marketing, operations — and the tools to build them have never been more accessible. And yet, in weekly standups and quarterly reviews, the same thing happens constantly: someone shares the numbers, the room nods, and the meeting ends without a decision or clear direction.
When that happens, the data usually takes the blame. The numbers weren&

Why Your Website Should Never Stop Changing

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0200

This article is a sponsored by Fimo
Every website is at its best the day it ships. The final branch merges, the site goes live exactly as designed, and it is briefly perfect. It will never be this good again.
Not because anything breaks. The site keeps working. But the market moves, the messaging shifts, a competitor launches something, and the careful thing you built slowly stops matching the company it represents. A year later, it is a period piece. Not broken, just behind. Every team knows th

Timing Charts: A Blueprint For SMIL Animations

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0200

We know that everything on the web is a box by default, but you’ll find many animated

s pretending to be circles. But if you’ve ever met a real , you’ll know that they’ve got a lot more going for them. Dressed in SVG, they fit into a wider range of crowds than a humble

wearing HTML/CSS can. has a strict no .html policy.
The tag is not as static as its name suggests. Any embedded JavaScript unfortunately won&rsqu

New EU Guidelines For AI Labelling

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0200

There’s been a lot of confusion and panic this week about “huge fines”, “drastic measures” and “sweeping new AI rules” in the EU. In reality, it’s a lot more narrow — and a lot more sensible. And mostly it’s about making AI more obvious when it actually needs to be obvious — especially for AI-generated content.
Starting from Aug 2, 2026, AI labelling is a legal requirement for any company that serves EU citizens. And similar to Eu

Building Tactile UX: Honoring Intentional Design With Lottie

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0200

This article is a sponsored by Isadora Agency
When front-end developers and UX engineers are tasked with building a web interface that feels tactile, bouncy, or destructive, the industry instinct is almost always the same: reach for a physics engine. Frameworks like Matter.js, Cannon.js, or custom WebGL solutions have become the gold standard for creating immersive, gamified websites.
When our team at Isadora Agency set out to build Stress Release, a digital stress-relief squeeze toy designed to

How to Add HTTP Password on an Astro Site

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0200

So you just built a site with Astro, and now you need to lock it down. Maybe it is a work-in-progress for a client, or an internal tool you do not want indexed by search engines.
You could set up a VPN, configure nginx auth, or install an npm package. But those add complexity, extra config files, and more things that can break.
Astro has a built-in middleware system that runs whenever a page or endpoint is rendered, and HTTP Basic Authentication is a standard HTTP feature supported by every brow

How Baseline Can Help You Ship Less JavaScript

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0200

Most of us install a dependency once and never look at it again. It does its job, the tests pass, and we move on. But the web platform keeps moving too, and a surprising number of the libraries sitting in your package.json today are now built into the browser.
In a typical mid-sized JavaScript app, you can often find somewhere between 60KB and 90KB (minified and gzipped) of dependencies that the platform can now handle on its own. Date and number formatting, HTTP requests, modals, tooltips, deep

Small Joys And Big Adventures (August 2026 Wallpapers Edition)

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0200

Everybody loves a beautiful wallpaper to freshen up their desktops and home screens, right? To provide you with inspiring designs on a regular basis, we started our monthly wallpapers series more than 15 years ago, and from the very beginning to today, artists and designers from across the globe have tickled their creativity and contributed their artworks to it.This August is no exception, of course, so following our monthly tradition, we have a new collection of wallpapers waiting for you below

Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers (July 2026)

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 03:00:00 +0200

July has been a busy month for new tools. This batch runs from AI agent evaluations and what AI agent skills actually do to self-hosted SSO, a PHP compiler that outputs native assembly, and a terminal app that speaks SCP, SFTP, S3, and half a dozen more protocols. If you are building apps, websites, or simply exploring what is new this month, I think you will find something worth your time here.
Codiff
Codiff is a fast, minimal diff viewer for reviewing Git changes outside your editor. It genera

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0200

Designers have spent years saying they would do better work if the organisation got out of the way. Not always in those exact words, obviously. It usually comes out as something more reasonable: we didn’t get enough engineering time, product had already decided the solution, the roadmap was too packed, leadership only cared about this quarter’s numbers, research got cut, the experiment was never run properly, the design debt was known about, but nobody wanted to spend a sprint fixing

Thinking Outside The Box: Digital Design In The AI Era

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0200

This article is a sponsored by MacPaw
The phrase “artificial intelligence” has many excited, especially those in tech. But for those of us in creative fields like digital art and design, AI can be more concerning than it is exciting.
AI-generated art, videos, and images have flooded the internet, raising questions about whether more companies will turn to tools like OpenAI’s Dall-E, Midjourney, Leonardo.ai, and more, rather than employing human artists. What’s more, the f

Weaponizing And Defending The React Flight Protocol: Deserialization Sinks In RSCs

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0200

React Server Components don’t send HTML to your browser. They don’t send JSON either. When a server component renders, what actually travels over the wire is a custom streaming protocol called Flight. It’s a line-delimited format with its own type system, its own reference resolution, and its own rules for reconstructing executable behavior on the client.
Most React developers have never opened the Network tab and actually looked at a Flight payload. It looks like a mix of JSON