Motion can be tricky: too much distracts, too little feels flat. Ambient animations sit in the middle. They’re subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In part two of his series, web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows how ambient animations can add personality to any website design.

A simple but powerful mental model for working with AI: treat it like an enthusiastic intern with no real-world experience. Paul Boag shares lessons learned from real client projects across user research, design, development, and content creation.

Research isn’t everything. Facts alone don’t win arguments, but powerful stories do. Here’s how to turn your research into narratives that inspire trust and influence decisions.

From A/B tests to AI slop, the modern web is bleeding out its colour. Standardized, templated, and overoptimized, it’s starting to feel like a digital Levittown. But it doesn’t have to be.

SVGs, they scale, yes, but how else can you make them adapt even better to several screen sizes? Web design pioneer Andy Clarke explains how he builds what he calls “adaptive SVGs” using ``, ``, and CSS Media Queries.

Ready to move beyond static mockups? Here is a practical, step-by-step guide to Intent Prototyping — a disciplined method that uses AI to turn your design intent (UI sketches, conceptual models, and user flows) directly into a live prototype, making it your primary canvas for ideation.

How about some new wallpapers to get your desktop ready for fall and the upcoming Halloween season? We’ve got you covered! Following our monthly tradition, the wallpapers in this post were created with love by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free. Enjoy!

What if your best AI prompts didn’t disappear into your unorganized chat history, but came back tomorrow as a reliable assistant? In this article, you’ll learn how to turn one-off “aha” prompts into reusable assistants that are tailored to your audience, grounded in your knowledge, and consistent every time, saving you (and your team) from typing the same 448-word prompt ever again.

Yegor Gilyov examines the problem of over-reliance on static high-fidelity mockups, which often leave the conceptual model and user flows dangerously underdeveloped. He then explores whether AI-powered prototyping is the answer, questioning whether the path forward is the popular “vibe coding” approach or a more structured, intent-driven approach.

Creating motion can be tricky. Too much and it’s distracting. Too little and a design feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground — subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In this article, web design pioneer Andy Clarke introduces the concept of ambient animations and explains how to implement them.

With digital products moving to incorporate generative and agentic AI at an increasingly frequent rate, trust has become the invisible user interface. When it works, interactions feel seamless. When it fails, the entire experience collapses. But trust isn’t mystical. It can be understood, measured, and designed for. Here are practical methods and strategies for designing more trustworthy and ethical AI systems.

As responsible digital professionals, we are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impact of our work and need to find effective and pragmatic ways to reduce it. James Chudley shares a new decarbonising approach that will help you to minimise the environmental impact of your website, benefiting people, profit, purpose, performance, and the planet.

From competitive SEO research and monitoring prices to training AI and parsing local geographic data, real-time search results power smarter apps. Tools like SerpApi make it easy to pull, customize, and integrate this data directly into your app or website.

For too long, personas have been created with considerable effort, only to offer limited value. Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way.

Elastic and bounce effects have long been among the most desirable but time-consuming techniques in motion design. Expressive Animator streamlines the process, making it possible to produce lively animations in seconds, bypassing the tedious work of manual keyframe editing.

Real-time dashboards are decision assistants, not passive displays. In environments like fleet management, healthcare, and operations, the cost of a delay or misstep is high. Karan Rawal explores strategic UX patterns that shorten time-to-decision, reduce cognitive overload, and make live systems trustworthy.

The idea behind this is to share a full, unfiltered look at integrating CSS Cascade Layers into an existing legacy codebase. In practice, it’s about refactoring existing CSS to use cascade layers without breaking anything.

After covering in detail the underlying interaction paradigms of TV experiences in [Part 1](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/designing-tv-evergreen-pattern-shapes-tv-experiences/), it’s time to get practical. In the second part of the series, you’ll explore the building blocks of the “10-foot experience” and how to best utilise them in your designs.

Could there be a better way to welcome the new month than with a new collection of desktop wallpapers? We’ve got some eye-catching designs to make your September just a bit more colorful. Enjoy!

Prompting is more than giving AI some instructions. You could think of it as a design act, part creative brief and part conversation design. This second article on AI augmenting design work introduces a designerly approach to prompting: one that blends creative briefing, interaction design, and structural clarity.

TV interface design is a unique, fascinating, and often overlooked field. It’s been guided by decades of evolution and innovation, yet still firmly constrained by its legacy. Follow Milan into the history, quirks, and unshakable rules that dictate how we control these devices.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are a great way to make apps built for the web feel native, but in moving away from a browser environment, we can introduce usability issues. This article covers how we can modify our app depending on what display mode is applied to mitigate these issues.

If you are new to using AI in design or curious about integrating AI into your UX process without losing your human touch, this article offers a grounded, day-by-day look at introducing AI into your design workflow.

AI has introduced huge efficiencies for web designers and is frequently being touted as the key to unlocking sustainable design and development. But do these gains outweigh the environmental cost of using energy-hungry AI tools?

AI tools are improving fast, but it’s still not clear how they fit into a real product design workflow. Nikita Samutin walks through four core stages — from analytics and ideation to prototyping and visual design — to show where AI fits and where it doesn’t, illustrated with real-world examples.

Rodolpho Henrique guides you through the essential aspects of color in digital design and user experience, from the practical steps of creating effective and scalable color palettes to critical accessibility considerations.

Your past shapes who you are as a designer, no matter where your career began or how unexpected your career path may have been. Stephanie Campbell shows how those lessons can sharpen your instincts, strengthen collaboration, and help you become a better designer today.

Prompting isn’t just about writing better instructions, but about designing better thinking. Ilia and Marina explore how advanced prompting can empower different product & design use cases, speeding up your workflow and improving results, from research and brainstorming to testing and beyond. Let’s dive in.

Internationalization isn’t just translation. It’s about formatting dates, pluralizing words, sorting names, and more, all according to specific locales. Instead of relying on heavy third-party libraries, modern JavaScript offers the Intl API — a powerful, native way to handle i18n. A quiet reminder that the web truly is worldwide.

Design systems are more than style guides: they’re made up of workflows, tokens, components, and documentation — all the stuff teams rely on to build consistent products. As projects grow, keeping everything in sync gets tricky fast. In this article, we’ll look at how smart tooling, combined with automation where it makes sense, can speed things up, reduce errors, and help your team focus on design over maintenance.

Talking points. Smart questions. A compelling story. This guide helps you prepare for your UX job interview. And remember: no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.

Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of desktop wallpapers might be for you. The wallpapers are designed with love by the community for the community and can be downloaded for free! Enjoy!

The Core Model is a practical methodology that flips traditional digital development on its head. Instead of starting with solutions or structure, we begin with a hypothesis about what users need and follow a simple framework that brings diverse teams together to create more effective digital experiences. By asking six good questions in the right order, teams align around user tasks and business objectives, creating clarity that transcends organizational boundaries.

Web Components are more than just Custom Elements. Shadow DOM, HTML Templates, and Custom Elements each play a role. In this article, Russell Beswick demonstrates how Shadow DOM fits into the broader picture, explaining why it matters, when to use it, and how to apply it effectively.

Today, roughly 10% of people are left-handed. Yet most products — digital and physical — aren’t designed with it in mind. Let’s change that. More design patterns in Smart Interface Design Patterns, a **friendly video course on UX** and design patterns by Vitaly.

Event listeners are essential for interactivity in JavaScript, but they can quietly cause memory leaks if not removed properly. And what if your event listener needs parameters? That’s where things get interesting. Amejimaobari Ollornwi shares which JavaScript features make handling parameters with event handlers both possible and well-supported.

Ensuring your product communicates clearly to a global audience is not just about localisation. Even for products that have a proper localisation process, English often remains the default language for UI and communications. This article focuses on how you can make English content clear and inclusive for non-native users. Oleksii offers a practical guide based on his own experience as a non-native English-speaking content designer, defining the user experience for international companies.

Learn why flip phones still matter in 2025, and how you can build and launch web apps for these tiny devices.

Designing a new AI feature? Where do you even begin? Here’s a simple, practical overview with useful design patterns for better AI experiences.

The Wizard of Oz method is a proven UX research tool that simulates real interactions to uncover authentic user behavior. Victor Yocco unpacks the core principles of the WOZ method, explores advanced real-world applications, and highlights its unique value, including its relevance in the emerging field of agentic AI.