Let’s make the most of the shortest of all months, with a new collection of desktop wallpapers celebrating new opportunities, sweet memories, happy little moments, and everything in between. All of them created with love by the community for the community. Enjoy! https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/desktop-wallpaper-calendars-february-2025/
Design systems play a crucial role in today’s digital landscape, providing a blueprint for consistent and user-friendly interfaces. But there’s another tool that deserves equal attention: the digital playbook. https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/digital-playbook-crucial-counterpart-design-system/
It’s not always the big features that make our everyday lives easier; sometimes, it’s those ease-of-life features that truly enhance our projects. In this article, Brecht De Ruyte highlights two such features: @starting-style and transition-behavior — two properties that are absolutely welcome additions to your everyday work with CSS animations.
https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/transitioning-top-layer-entries-display-property-css/
After months of anticipation, debate, and even a bit of apprehension, Svelte 5 arrived earlier this year. Frederick O’Brien caught up with its creator, Rich Harris, to talk about the path that brought him and his team here and what lies ahead. https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/svelte-5-future-frameworks-chat-rich-harris/
Alvaro Saburido delves into the current state and challenges of Open-Source authoring, sharing lessons learned from both community- and company-driven initiatives. https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/navigating-challenges-modern-open-source-authoring/
A once-revered perk of some tech workplaces, the status of ‘side project time’ seems to have slipped in recent years. Frederick O’Brien believes it deserves a comeback. https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/ode-to-side-project-time/
Shouldn’t there be a way to keep your apps or project data private and improve performance by reducing server latency? This is what on-device AI is designed to solve. It handles AI processing locally, right on your device, without connecting to the internet and sending data to the cloud. In this article, Joas Pambou explains what on-device AI is, why it’s important, the tools to build this type of technology, and how it can change the way we use technology every day. https://smashingmagazine.com
How do we determine the most suitable illustration style? How should illustrations complement and reflect your corporate identity? What will resonate most with your target audience? And regarding the content, what type of illustration would best enhance it, and how would it work for the age range it is primarily for? Thomas Bohm shares insightful examples and discusses the key qualities of effective illustrations, emphasizing the importance of understanding your audience. https://smashingmagazin
The best and worst thing about solo development is the “solo” part. There’s a lot of freedom in working alone, and that freedom can be inspiring, but it can also become a debilitating hindrance to productivity and progress. Victor Ayomipo shares his personal lessons on what it takes to navigate solo development and build the “right” app. https://smashingmagazine.com/2025/01/solo-development-learning-to-let-go-of-perfection/
We know that browsers do all sorts of different things under the hood. One of those things is the way they not only fetch resources like images and scripts from the server but how they prioritize those resources. Chrome and Safari have implemented a “Tight Mode” that constrains which resources are loaded and in what order, but they each take drastically different approaches to it. With so little information about Tight Mode