Smashing Magazine

November can feel rather gray in many parts of the world, so what better way to brighten the month than with some colorful inspiration? Our new collection of desktop wallpapers has you covered.

Following our monthly tradition, which has been ...

So what icon is the most reliable to show expansion and collapsing for accordions? Is there really any noticeable difference between carets, chevrons, arrows, and triangles?

Well, research shows that there is some difference indeed. But what’s mo...

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 ...

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

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 unde...