UI (User Interfaces) — Smashing Magazine

162 articles

The Digital Playbook: A Crucial Counterpart To Your Design System

January 30, 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. Read more&mldr;

Alvaro Saburido wrote

Navigating The Challenges Of Modern Open-Source Authoring: Lessons Learned

January 21, 2025 — Alvaro Saburido delves into the current state and challenges of Open-Source authoring, sharing lessons learned from both community- and company-driven initiatives. Read more&mldr;

Atila Fassina wrote

The Hype Around Signals

November 27, 2024 — From KnockoutJS to modern UI libraries like SolidJS, Vue.js, and Svelte, signals revolutionized how we think about reactivity in UIs. Here’s a deep dive into their history and impact by Atila Fassina. Read more&mldr;

Atila Fassina wrote

Open-Source Meets Design Tooling With Penpot

November 14, 2024 — Penpot helps designers and developers work better together by offering a free, open-source design tool based on open web standards. Today, let’s explore its newly released Penpot Plugin System. So now, if there’s a functionality missing, you don’t need to jump into the code base straight away; you can create a plugin to achieve what you need. And you can even serve it from localhost! Read more&mldr;

Mikołaj Dobrucki wrote

Build Design Systems With Penpot Components

July 18, 2024 — In today’s turbulent landscape of design, Penpot stands out with its commitment to open-source, free unlimited access, and its unique, robust features. An example could be its new components system that takes another leap forward in aligning design with code. Let’s dive into how it empowers both designers and developers to create more maintainable and scalable design systems. Read more&mldr;

Vitaly Friedman wrote

Decision Trees For UI Components

May 29, 2024 — Imagine finally resolving never-ending discussions about UI decisions for good. Here are some practical examples of decision trees for UI components and how to use them effectively. An upcoming part of Smart Interface Design Patterns. Read more&mldr;

Mikołaj Dobrucki wrote

Penpot’s CSS Grid Layout: Designing With Superpowers

April 11, 2024 — Penpot helps designers and developers work better together by offering a free, open-source design tool based on open web standards. Today, let’s explore Penpot’s latest feature, CSS Grid Layout. Penpot’s latest release is about efficiency and so much more. It gives designers superpowers and a better place at the table. Excited? Let’s take a look at it together. Read more&mldr;

Preethi Sam wrote

The Things Users Would Appreciate In Mobile Apps

April 5, 2024 — What can we do to make a mobile app better? What subsidiary features are worth providing for our users? I have some ideas. You might, too. So, let’s compare our notes. Without any prescriptions attached, here are seven features I believe can palpably improve a user’s experience with a mobile app. Read more&mldr;

Adrian Bece wrote

The View Transitions API And Delightful UI Animations (Part 2)

January 2, 2024 — The View Transitions API is a new — but game-changing — feature that allows us to do the types of reactive state-based UI and page transitions that have traditionally been exclusive to JavaScript frameworks. In the second half of this mini two-part series, Adrian Bece expands on the demos from the first article to demonstrate how the View Transitions API can be used to transition not just elements between two states but the transition between full views and pages in single-page and multi-page applications. Read more&mldr;

Adrian Bece wrote

The View Transitions API And Delightful UI Animations (Part 1)

December 22, 2023 — The View Transitions API is a new — but game-changing — feature that allows us to do the types of reactive state-based UI and page transitions that have traditionally been exclusive to JavaScript frameworks. In the first part of this mini two-part series, Adrian Bece thoroughly explains why we need the API and demonstrates its basic usage. Read more&mldr;