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.

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.