Smashing magazine why

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In August , I signed the contract with the Smashing team and got officially started with the code. At that point, and after all the frequent discussions with Dan and the team, I had a very clear idea of the direction Dan wanted to set for the design.

A couple of months after, I took on some of the UI design of the project with that direction in mind. Right from the beginning of the project, Dan talked to everyone on the team and gathered feedback from everyone about what Smashing Magazine is to them and what they expected of it. I believe the most relevant design contribution I made was emphasizing the importance of the community behind the magazine. I always felt that authors were underrepresented on most Web magazines, even though their contribution is the most important one as it is their content that fuels those magazines to begin with.

So this was the first piece of design feedback I gave to Dan: Giving authors a more prominent place and space on the magazine. Smashing Magazine, being what it is: a magazine by the community, for the community, had better reflect that. My feedback was incorporated into the main article pages as well as the article lists on the homepage.

Marco also contributed throughout the entire project by providing feedback to the design after I took over later in October. When Marco also became temporarily unavailable and had to focus on other commitments, I took over the design part completely. By the time I did, the Books, Events and Jobs sections of the magazine were left undesigned, so my job was extended to design those sections as well. Following the direction Dan set at the beginning of the project and this is where the early discussions with Dan showed the most results , I designed those sections, using the same boldness and style Dan started.

I have to admit: the part I'm most proud of designing is the Smashing Conferences page—a. It always took too many clicks to get to the information I needed to get a clear overview of the conference: speakers, talks, locations, and more. Moving from a multi-page structure to a one-page, simple, clear and straight-to-the-point structure was the most satisfying part.

I'm not a cat person but it's very hard not to love the cute Smashing cat he created. I asked Ricardo for a ticket illustration which I initially wanted to use as a background for the main call to action on the page—the Get Tickets button. Possibly the most challenging of all design requirements was making the new Smashing navigation work for the different requirements we had. The navigation was initially designed to be collapsible and hidden behind the Menu button.

So, the header of the magazine initially only contained the logo on the left, a wide search input field in the middle, and the menu button on the left.

Inside the dropdown, you'd find the main menu items leading to the four main sections of the magazine: Articles, Events, Books, and the Job board. The navigation was also designed to include the different article categories as well as have the search input field animate down into the dropdown when the menu button is clicked. Then, when you start typing into the search field, you'd get a short list of the most relevant search results, with an option to explore all the other related articles as well.

The navigation was brilliant. And I loved it on every possible level. But I was a bit in doubt about the fact that the navigation items were hidden on larger screens as well. Dan had some reasoning as to why he hid it, and there was long discussion about it. We initially left it as is. I built the navigation as per these mockups.

There is a video showing how the navigation was meant to work. However, the navigation had to be changed and tweaked a lot emphasis on a lot before we finally decided on a design that we could stick with.

In addition, Netlify CMS is platform agnostic and works with almost all static site generators and sites stored in Github. We are in the midst of writing a more technical account of the Smashing Project, expect an update soon.

Their users will have a smoother experience due to the easier integrations, speed, and better performance. Smashing now has the unified platform they desired with the design they dreamed of. They go to one place for the robust needs of their site. The Jamstack has proven it is the captain of the modern web renaissance and we believe open source technologies will be the key in moving it even further. Learn more at Jamstack. The Smashing Problem: There was a modern web renaissance taking place and Smashing planned to be a part of it.

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