Design systems are a crucial success factor for digital businesses, and virtually every major player works with one. Still, they can sometimes be hard to sell to management. Here’s a ready-to-use formula to calculate the ROI of any design system.

by @dfadeyev

Responsive Web design has been evolving rapidly ever since Ethan Marcotte coined the term two years ago. Since then, techniques have emerged, become best practices and formed part of our ever-changing methodology. A few obvious examples are the multitude of responsive image techniques, conditional loading, and responsive design and server-side components (RESS), among many other existing and emerging strands stemming from the core concept of responsive Web design.

How do you convince clients to trust you with their valuable and much-loved product? In my experience, the best way to sell work to clients is to apply user-centered design not only to the work we produce, but also to the clients who commission that work.

Interaction designers create wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. However, emailing your old static designs will feel old fashioned once you **see what these new tools can do**.

We might not realize it, but as developers, we build inaccessible websites all the time. It's not for the lack of care or talent though — it's a matter of doing things the wrong way. In our new book, Inclusive Design Patterns, Heydon Pickering explains how we can craft accessible interfaces without extra effort — and what front-end design patterns we can use to create inclusive experiences. Quality hardcover, 312 pages.

Michelangelo once said, "The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself." Translate this to the world of Web design and you might say, "No matter how great a designer you are, you’re only as good as your content." While the reality of client work sometimes makes it challenging to gather and produce content prior to starting the design, this is now widely accepted as being necessary.

Truth be told, I am a philistine. When people talk about recycling, I don’t think of saving the planet. In my earlier post, “Lessons Learned: Productivity Tips For Running A Web Design Business,” I wrote about how we can reuse and recycle what we do in the Web industry to save time and money.

Designing websites and related media for kids presents plenty of opportunities for Web designers. Openings are available at many businesses and schools, as well as through parents and kids themselves, giving designers many ways to find work on electronic and print projects that appeal to kids. The types of work range from interface designs for video games to websites for birthday parties.

The input form is an essential element of almost any website or application these days. Input is a core method of interaction, and in many cases it represents the hard conversion point between success and failure. With the amount time and effort we put into bringing users to our sign-up and contact forms, it’s surprising that we tend not to spend a proportional amount of time on the forms themselves.

This article tries to show how developing a process for Web design can organize a developer's thoughts, speed up a project's timeline and prepare a freelance business for growth. First of all, what exactly is a 'process'? A **Web development process** is a documented outline of the steps needed to be taken from start to finish in order to complete a typical Web design project.

There are tools that make our lives much easier. However, finding those obscure time-savers which would save time in every single project isn't easy and requires a lot of time. At Smashing Magazine, we are regularly looking for such useful tools, gather them, review them and eventually prepare for a truly smashing round-up. Such posts are quite lengthy and extensive, but they are always worth checking out.

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Israel is a young country with an old heart. It has been quickly built up over the last 60 years as an independent democratic Jewish state and is shockingly cutting edge for a country so new. What’s unique about Israeli web design?

I had the opportunity to work with some very talented and highly experienced designers who all had made the jump from other design fields to the Web. It was there, as part of that training, that I learned about **critiquing**, both giving and receiving, through regular design reviews.

The design profession is full of happy folks, and understanding why so many designers enjoy their work is not hard. But not all are so happy. If you’re not careful, the joy of getting paid to pursue your passion can be tainted by the less joyous realities of the professional world. You see, no matter how skilled you are as a designer, unless you are equally prepared in **professional matters**, your prospects will be limited and your circumstances compromised. This is true whether you work freelance, for an agency or in-house with a company.

… css layouts, visual effects and forms