Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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.

We’ve all heard of the sacred rule in modern web development, the rule never to be broken. The rule of “Never block the main thread.”

You almost can’t miss it as a web developer; it’s in almost every performance guide, and to be fair, it is good advice. We all know the browser’s main thread is single-threaded, meaning it can only do one thing ...

Many companies silently assume that everybody wants more AI in their lives. That people are craving new AI features, new AI products, new AI workflows — that would all magically replace all existing outdated practices and broken ways of working.

But in reality, it seems like people don’t want more AI at all — at least not in the way mo...

When a branding project fails, it usually happens long before the logo stage: in the strategy phase, when words like “modern,” “trustworthy,” “premium,” “friendly,” and “disruptive” are left undefined. The result is a gap between what the brand is supposed to communicate and what the designer is expected to create. This is the space I like to call the “pre-concept” ph...

Mental health applications keep facing a continuing, measurable crisis: many people stop using them quickly. The data is stark: almost 95% of users who open the app on day 1 abandon the app by day 30, with a median 30-day retention of only 3.3%. Even the recognised mental health gian...