Vitaly Friedman

Insights into Smashing Magazine’s Relaunch — with decisions made, failures, successes and lessons learned along the way. 

You’ve been there: big bang redesigns are usually a very, very bad idea. Redesigning and rebuilding an existing website from scratch is risky and unpredictable, and in many cases the level of complexity is highly underrated and underestimated. In mid-2016, Smashing Magazine has decided to make a big switch from the existing WordPress setup to an entirely new design, entirely new architecture (JAM Stack) and an entirely new, GitHub-based, editorial workflow.

In this talk, Vitaly Friedman, co-founder and creative lead of Smashing Magazine, will share some of the insights into Smashing Magazine’s Relaunch — with decisions made, failures, successes and lessons learned along the way. You’ll learn which challenges the transition from WordPress to a Netlify setup posed, how the team solved them and how things have evolved over years, and how switching a seemingly simple system with a job board, subscription, shop and magazine might slowly turn into a little beast that has to be tamed and cared for.

2019 London

JAMstack Conf

Big Bang Redesign: Smashing Magazine’s Relaunch, a Case Study

Explore horrible, boring, and unique User Interfaces. Learn how design, usability, and UX intersect.

On the web today, everything looks like everything else, unless it's unreadable, inaccessible, confusing and disruptive. How do we strike a balance between leaving a memorable impression and helping users with a convenient and familiar interface? Or, put differently, how do we break out of predictable and boring designs without breaking the usability and functionality of our experiences?

In this talk, Vitaly will shed some light into a strategy of how to bring personality back to web design, and how we can make our experiences more humane, while also having a higher return on investment. We'll look into the good ol' UX nightmares and disruptive patterns, from annoying pop-ups to shady GDPR consent overlays; from unreadable CAPTCHAs to disturbing notifications. 

We'll explore how to design better carousels, complex tables, car configurators, seat selection, historical timelines and baseball tournament brackets. Beware: you might not be able to unlearn what you'll learn in this session. Bonus: you'll see some slightly dirty examples of things being done out there, so bring along some pragmatism to this talk.