With CSS animation now supported in both Firefox and Webkit browsers, there is no better time to give it a try. Regardless of its technical form, whether traditional, computer-generated 3-D, Flash or CSS, animation always follows the same basic principles.

In this article, we will take our first steps with CSS animation and consider the main guidelines for creating animation with CSS. We’ll be working through an example, building up the animation using the principles of traditional animation. Finally, we’ll see some real-world usages.

  

Today we are glad to release a yet another freebie: a Facebook Fan Page GUI PSD, designed by Hike and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The PSD will speed up the process of creating previews, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. All layers are vectorized, allowing you to scale up the GUI without loss of quality. The mock-up is 100% pixel-accurate, it has 4 viewing modes (default wall, wireframe wall, default tab, wireframe tab), all layers labeled and grouped. Smart guides are included. The PSD is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS3+.

With every update Facebook performs to its fan page design, Hike reproduces it 24 hours later and updates its download link with the latest version. The main idea behind this PSD was to provide all designers and agencies with a useful tool that will improvs their daily workflow when it comes to preparing Facebook-related previews for their clients or internal presentations. As usual, the goodie is absolutely free to use in private and commercial projects.

  

I was a competitive road cyclist for four years. My bikes were good, but my race results were much less impressive. Instead of medals and trophies, all I had to show for it were shaved legs and a farmer’s tan. Regardless, on the road to becoming a competitive athlete, I followed a rigorous training plan with concrete goals. These goals were specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. With this training plan, I was able to quantitatively and qualitatively assess my progress and adjust my routine to match.

In the years since, I’ve hung up my racing jersey and replaced it with a designer’s hat. While wearing this hat, I (and many others) have been told to “create a good user experience.” We’ve heard this in creative briefs, project kick-off meetings and critiques. It may have been a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation or uttered by someone trying to sell a client or company on the value of their services. But there’s a fundamental problem with stating that your goal is to “create a good user experience.”

Last year, in partnership with An Event Apart, we debuted the 10K Apart Contest. The challenge was simple: build the best application you can with no more than 10K of code. If our analytics are telling the truth, the 10K was a smash hit. The contest reaped 367 entries in less than a month. And

For the past few years, I have had the luxury of working on projects which I own the development entirely, from end to end. My work on Mix Online (Oomph, Glimmer, Archivist Web, Archivist Desktop, Flotzam, and Incarnate) has been architected and written by me, in collaboration with a designer but with no other developers.

Your corporate site has everything. Product details. Media info. Legal terms. Calls to action. Friendly support. People flock there every day. It’s the perfect feeding ground. Duh dun duh dun duh dun.

I've been thinking about this for some time, and it's time we talk, IE6.

Have you noticed that infographics are everywhere? You can't swing a diagram of a cat without hitting an infographic about making an infographic. As someone who loves data viz to death (I do it for a living) I've been stewing about the meaning of this trend. A lot.

Guids. As in globally unique identifiers. Love 'em. And hate 'em. I mean , you gotta admit, they're kinda cool. Like fingerprints. Or snowflakes. But unlike snowflakes or fingerprints created through the magic of nature, the GUID can be created by me, the software developer! I have the power! In fact, who wants to play

The Web is an eternal débutante. Since 1995, when Marc Andreessen predicted that the Web would make Windows and Linux obsolete, people have presumed that Web standards would become the client platform of choice. Instead of just Web pages, the Web would be used for applications. For those who love the Web, the last 20

I am currently reading Decoded by Jay-Z. This passage stopped me dead in my tracks last night (it’s a little long, but worth it): It’s been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it’s built around two kinds of rhythm.

I’ve been prototyping a new service, sketching out the different pieces: payload protocol, storage, data model, transport, client/server communication, etc.  And, upon completion of the prototype, I stepped back and looked at the decisions made. For example, how are we storing the data? Raw JSON.  How are we serving data? As JSON. It suddenly struck

Today, people will watch more than 2 billion movies on the Internet. That’s right, two billion. Video is a big deal. Fortunately, HTML5 will make it easier for you to add video when you use a new HTML element called VIDEO. The new video element is similar to the IMG element for images—it sits within

  

We spend a lot of time learning and thinking about the designs we see online, yet what we miss quite often are practical insights into the design process and workflow of our colleagues. This is why conferences are great for our industry. We meet people who think very much like we do and most probably struggle with similar problems; and perhaps they've found a solution which can inspire others.

We learn how our colleagues work and what they have experienced; we can exchange our thoughts and ideas directly — something that we might struggle finding time for on Twitter or via email. Networking is great, and it's powerful. And this is why every now and again we present an overview of upcoming conferences on Smashing Magazine.

  

Anyone designing Web-based properties today requires a basic understanding of interaction design principles. Even if your training is not formally in human-computer interaction, user experience design or human factors, knowing the fundamentals of these disciplines greatly enhances the chances of your design’s success. This is especially true for visual designers. Many visual designers are formally trained in art school and informally trained at interactive agencies.

While these institutions focus on designing communications, neither typically provides a strong interaction design foundation. Having a broader skill set not only makes your designs more successful but makes you more valuable and employable (i.e. you become the unicorn). While in no way exhaustive, to get you started, here are five key tactics to understand and implement in your next project.

  

I’ve been using LESS religiously ever since I stumbled upon it months ago. CSS was never really a problem for me, in and of itself, but I was intrigued by the idea of using variables to create something along the lines of a color palette for my websites and themes. Having a color palette with a fixed number of options to choose from helps prevent me from going color crazy and deviating from a chosen style. The main difference between LESS and Sass is the way in which they are processed. LESS is a JavaScript library and is, therefore, processed client-side.

Sass, on the other hand, runs on Ruby and is processed server-side. A lot of developers might not choose LESS because of the additional time needed for the JavaScript engine to process the code and output the modified CSS to the browser. There are a few ways around this. The way I get around it is to use LESS only during the development process. Once I’m finished, I copy and paste the LESS output into a minifier and then into a separate CSS file to be included in place of the LESS files.

  

When we started Smashing Magazine, we didn’t expect anything. We didn’t have a grand master plan for a successful online magazine for designers and developers. We created something that we found useful and that we thought others would find useful, too. We did not lose focus, we relied on instinct more than once, we stayed patient, and we pulled the occasional night shift. That was 2006.

And then you came along.

You have passed the word along, left comments, dropped us emails. You let us know that we matter. You let us know that we are doing something meaningful. And you let us know that our humble work deserved your attention. And we listened — carefully.

  

You’re developing a new website and have decided to use some CSS3 and HTML5, now that many of the new specifications are gaining widespread support. As you’re coding the theme and thinking of how much easier these new technologies are making your job, you decide to stop for a while and test in other browsers, feeling a bit guilty for getting carried away and having forgotten to do so for a while. “Please work,” you whisper to your computer, while firing up all of the browsers you have installed. Browser A, check. You smile, feeling a bit relieved. Browser B, check. Your smile widens, and you start to feel better already. Browser C, “FFFFUUUUUUUUUUU…!”

Sound familiar? You might be surprised to hear that this is not necessarily your fault. With the competition in the browser market these days and the fast pace at which the new specifications are developing, browser makers are implementing new stuff in a hurry, sometimes without properly testing it. CSS3 and HTML5 are much more complex than their predecessors. The number of possible combinations of new features is huge, which leads to the most common cause of bugs: two (or more) things that weren’t tested together. As a result, developers these days stumble upon browser bugs much more frequently than they used to.

  

In part one of this series, we looked at the consequences of designing and developing software in isolated environments. Some people work in lonely silos where no process exists, while others work in functional silos where too much (or the wrong) process makes innovation and progress difficult.

So, how do we break down the artificial walls that keep us from creating great things together? How can organizations foster environments that encourage natural, unforced collaboration? There are no quick fixes, but these are far from insurmountable problems.

Customers aren't shy about shouting their experiences—good and bad—to the world via Twitter and Facebook. When you see customer service as a cost center, you risk treating customers as a liability. Yet, customers are a valuable resource: their feedback is integral to shaping your product and building your brand. Customer service, by definition, is about serving people; it should be genuine, personalized, and compassionate—or, simply put, human.