From Cats With Love: New Navigation, Guides And Workshops

5 min read
Events, Workshops, Smashing
Share on Twitter, LinkedIn

About The Author

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬

Email Newsletter

Weekly tips on front-end & UX.
Trusted by 200,000+ folks.

At Smashing, we’ve been busy over the last few months. We’ve set up new workshops, redesigned our navigation, refined performance and improved accessibility. There are subtle UX changes coming in, and we’d love to share what we’ve been cooking. A sincere thank you for your kind, ongoing support and generosity — thank you for being smashing, now and ever!

Not many people know that the entire Smashing Family is a very small team with just 15 wonderful people working day-to-day on everything from magazine and books to front-end and design. At times it might feel like that’s quite a bit of work, but we do our best to be well-organized and be productive, while working (well, mostly) 100% remote for almost a decade now.

In fact, we’ve been quite busy over the last few months. We’ve been running our online workshops, redesigned our navigation, refactored a number of components, refined performance and improved accessibility. There are more subtle UX changes coming in, and we’d love to share what we’ve been cooking. Settle in.

Upcoming Online Workshops

We’ve run 40 workshops with 2.600 attendees so far, and we’ve learned how to run a workshop where you, dear readers, learn best. So for the next months, we’ve set up a full schedule on front-end and design, from web performance to interface design. Jump to all workshops ↬

Workshops in April–May

Web Performance Masterclass Dev
with Harry Roberts. Apr 20 – May 5.
Smart Interface Design Patterns UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Apr 22 – May 6.
Make Design Systems People Want to Use Workflow
with Dan Mall. May 3–11.
Psychology For UX and Product Design UX
with Joe Leech. May 6–14.
The React Performance Masterclass dev
with Ivan Akulov. May 20 – June 4.
Dynamic CSS Masterclass dev
with Lea Verou. May 25 – June 8.

Jump to all workshops →

A happy workshop attendee — Meet our friendly front-end & UX workshops. Boost your skills online and learn from experts — live.

Workshops in June–July

New Adventures in Front-End, 2021 Dev
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 9–23.
Successful Design Systems Dev Workflow
with Brad Frost. June 29 – July 13.
Level-Up With Modern CSS dev
with Stephanie Eckles. July 8–22.
Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. July 22–30.

Jump to all workshops →

No pre-recorded sessions, no big picture talks. Our online workshops take place live and span multiple days across weeks. They are split into 2.5h-sessions, plus you’ll get all workshop video recordings, slides and a friendly Q&A in every session. (Ah, you can save up to 25% off with a Smashing Membership — just sayin’!.)

With so many articles on the site, finding the right articles can be difficult. So for the last weeks, we’ve been going through 3.500 articles and manually refining and standardizing the underlying taxonomy of our posts. You might have been there as well: dealing with articles accommodated over 15 years wasn’t quite easy.

A screengrab of the Smashing Accessibilit category page made on April 15, 2021 — Meet the new navigation on SmashingMag — we’d love to hear your feedback on Twitter, of course!

That was quite an exercise in patience and hard work — but now we are happy to roll out the new navigation, with important navigation options surfaced prominently across the entire site. Hopefully, you’ll find the new navigation (on the top of this page, too) more useful.

Please leave a comment if you spot any bugs, mistakes, or perhaps something important missing — we’ll do our best to fix it and deploy right away.

New Evergreen Guides (Beta Testing)

We have also rolled out new article formats — evegreen guides. These are the articles with curated articles, tutorials, tools and resources that we keep updating regularly. There are a few more of those coming up, but they should be a reliable source of techniques and tools.

Here’s what we’ve published so far:

You can also access the guide on the new Smashing Magazine's frontpage, although some UI/UX changes will be coming in there as well. Feedback? We are listening on Twitter, of course.

Join Our Free Online Meet-Up (Apr 27)

We’re getting closer and closer to our free online meetup coming April 27 — and we’d be honored and humbled to welcome you there. There we will be running a website makeover of the Powercoders NGO, live.

An illustration of the Smashing cat wearing headphones alongside his friends, Doggie and Birdie — Join Smashing Meets for free — we look forward to seeing you there.

Tickets are absolutely free. So, if you don’t have one yet, please check out the details, speakers, schedule and timezones and get your ticket today, mark your calendars and invite your friends and colleagues to join in.

Join the free meet-up →

Thank You!

We are very committed to improving Smashing in every possible way, and we are working hard to do just that behind the scenes. We’d sincerely appreciate you recommending our little site, our articles and workshops to your friends and colleagues — and we hope that they will help you boost your skills and the quality of your work.

A sincere thank you for your kind, ongoing support and generosity — thank you for being smashing, now and ever. Ah, and subscribe to our newsletter — we have plenty of new announcements coming up soon! ;)