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8 October 2011 0 Comments

16 Pixels: For Body Copy. Anything Less Is A Costly Mistake

    16 Pixels For Body Copy. Anything Less IsA Costly Mistake I know what you’re thinking. “Did he just say 16 pixels? For body copy? Obnoxiously big! 12 pixels is ideal for most websites.” I’d like to persuade you otherwise. As usability expert Oliver Reichenstein says in “The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard”: [16 pixels] is [...]

7 October 2011 0 Comments

Not Your Parent’s Mobile Phone: UX Design Guidelines For Smartphones

    In your pocket right now is the most powerful “remote control” (as Drew Diskin put it) that has ever existed. It is no ordinary remote control. It can harness everything that all of the previous mass media (television, radio, Internet, etc.) can do. People aren’t using them just for simple entertainment or for [...]

6 October 2011 0 Comments

The Smashing Coffee Mug Photo Contest – Join In!

    Here’s a task for you! Have a look at your desk, take a shot of your beloved coffee mug, send us the photo, and see if you’re added to the huge poster that we’ll be creating from the best images that we get from all over the world. We’ll prepare an exclusive version [...]

5 October 2011 0 Comments

Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors

    It’s easy to see your top-visited pages, navigation patterns and conversion metrics using visitor-tracking tools like Google Analytics. However, this data doesn’t show the roadblocks that users typically run into on your website. Tracking and optimizing error messages will help you measurably improve your website’s user experience. We’ll walk through how to add [...]

5 October 2011 0 Comments

How To Create Custom Post Meta Boxes In WordPress

    What seems like one of the most complicated bits of functionality in WordPress is adding meta boxes to the post editing screen. This complexity only grows as more and more tutorials are written on the process with weird loops and arrays. Even meta box “frameworks” have been developed. I’ll let you in on [...]

5 October 2011 0 Comments

A Quick Look Into The Math Of Animations With JavaScript

    In school, I hated math. It was a dire, dry and boring thing with stuffy old books and very theoretical problems. Even worse, a lot of the tasks were repetitive, with a simple logical change in every iteration (dividing numbers by hand, differentials, etc.). It was exactly the reason why we invented computers. [...]

4 October 2011 0 Comments

The Whys And The Hows Of Textures In Web Design

    Texture is becoming integral to design. It’s gone beyond being a trend — it’s now a simple and effective way to add depth to a website. Wielding the power of texture is a great responsibility. It increases the effectiveness of websites and is a quality tool in the arsenal of designers. It can guide the [...]

1 October 2011 0 Comments

Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: October 2011

    We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This [...]

1 October 2011 0 Comments

WordPress Essentials: How To Create A WordPress Plugin

    WordPress plugins are PHP scripts that alter your website. The changes could be anything from the simplest tweak in the header to a more drastic makeover (such as changing how log-ins work, triggering emails to be sent, and much more). Whereas themes modify the look of your website, plugins change how it functions. [...]

30 September 2011 0 Comments

Conversation Techniques For Designers

    Designers are visually literate creatures. We use visuals to express our ideas, whether by building wireframes, sketching interfaces or pushing pixels. As a result, the majority of knowledge captured when we design a product is some form of “corporate memory”: a combination of assets and documentation. This creation of visual artifact is widely [...]

30 September 2011 0 Comments

How To Make An eBook

    Making an eBook is easy, regardless of your coding experience. This is good, because 99.9% of your time should be spent on writing and getting your book out there, rather than on technology. EPUB And Kindle Any electronic book can be called an eBook, but because over 90% of all eBooks are read [...]

29 September 2011 0 Comments

You’re Pricing It Wrong: Software Pricing Demystified

    Pricing your own product is always a tricky proposition, and the more critical the price is to your product’s success, the more difficult it is to set. It’s easy to look at another product and say how much you would be willing to pay for it, but how can you know how much [...]