Smashing Newsletter: Issue #505

Editorial

Bold design languages shape the personality of a product. In times when many interfaces appear clean, minimalistic, and predictable, it’s the design language and tone and voice that shape the unique personality of a product.

In this newsletter, we are looking into a key ingredient for that personality — graphic design. We look at some inspirational archives of graphic design, vintage posters, archive of public artwork and a visual guide to Eurovision.

In the meantime, the Smashing Cat is going places! We are launching a brand new adventure — Smashing In-Person Workshops, with practical UX and front-end workshops coming to the city near you.

Design Patterns For Complex UIs and AI (NY 🇺🇸, Jun 23), with Vitaly Friedman
Diving Deep Into Design Tokens (Antwerp 🇧🇪, Sep 4), with Brad Frost
How To Measure UX and Design Impact (Antwerp 🇧🇪, Sep 4) with Vitaly Friedman.

Next month, we’ll be talking about a topic very close to everyone: work. How do you find the job you’ve always wanted? How can you work best with difficult folks? Christine Vallaure, Jason Mesut and Geoff Graham share their experiences on Smashing Meets for Work (Thu, May 29).

Of course, we also have more wonderful workshops and conferences coming up:

The Secrets of Web Performance with Ryan Townsend,
Enterprise UX Masterclass with Marko Dugonjić,
Free Workshop: Figma Unlocked: What’s New from Config with Christine Vallaure,
How To Measure UX and Design Impact, with yours truly, Vitaly Friedman.

We hope you’ll find them useful — and of course, we are looking forward to seeing you online and offline, everyone!

— Vitaly

1. The People’s Graphic Design Archive

The People’s Graphic Design Archive is a very special project. Its goal is to realize a virtual, crowdsourced archive that preserves graphic design history. And it’s exactly that crowdsourcing aspect, allowing everyone to contribute their graphic design history treasures to it, that makes the collection so diverse and unique.

Whether it’s humor, feminism, the design of Latin-Caribbean Islands, student activism, Space Age, Olympics posters, or instant ramen packaging, the archive features more than 10,000 items from all corners and eras of graphic design. You can browse it by collection or topic, or just scroll through the home page to discover some random goodies. A treasure chest of inspiration. (cm)

2. Collaborative Storytelling

Humans have always made up stories. Our earliest ancestors told them by the fire and painted them on cave walls; we publish them in books and on the web. Imagination is a primal power that connects us all, across time, across cultures, across inequalities in a society — and when we collaborate, we can create something even bigger than what one human mind could imagine.

To harness the power of creative collaboration, the writing platform Switch-Lit is on a mission to bring people from all walks of life together to create collaborative fiction and poetry, giving them equal say in a story and weaving together multiple perspectives.

You don’t have to be a writer or storyteller to participate. Just create a free account, team up with a writing partner, and take turns writing, reading, and editing, until your story is ready to be submitted for featured publishing. A wonderful initiative that opens up new perspectives — for the writers and the readers. (cm)

3. Public-Domain Content Search Engine

Whenever you feel stuck and need some inspiration or a little distraction from your work on a design project, Public Work might be for you. The search engine lets you explore more than 100,000 public domain works such as scans, prints, images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources — historical creative work that is no longer protected by copyright and can be freely used, modified, and distributed.

Public Work is more than a lovely source of historical artifacts, though. You can also use it to research themes, various points of view, and detailed drawings of objects, people, and nature, grouped by similarity and topic. Happy browsing! (cm)

4. Digital Archive Of Graphic Design

Featuring everything from graphic design annuals and type specimens from the 1950s to the NASA Graphics Standards Manual and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, archives.design is a treasure chest for anyone who has a sweet spot for vintage graphic design.

Curated by Valery Marier, the archive includes artifacts from editorial design, branding, posters, information design, ephemera, typography, and much more. Each item has a short description and a link to the Internet Archive, where you can view the full version. A wonderful resource to help you discover stellar graphic design pieces from the 20th century. (cm)

5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences

That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.

Smashing Online Events — With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.

As always, here’s a quick overview:

The Secrets of Web Performance dev
with Ryan Townsend. May 7–21
How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX (+ video course)
with Vitaly Friedman. May 12–20
Enterprise UX Masterclass UX
with Marko Dugonjić. May 14–21
Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 4–18
Accessibility for Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Jun 16–24
Smart Interface Design Patterns UX
with Vitaly Friedman.
Jump to all workshops →

6. Good Movies As Old Books

What if your favorite movie was a book — have you ever imagined what it would look like? Is it a small paperback you can easily carry around? Or maybe a linen-bound hardcover with debossing and gold foil accents? That’s exactly what Matt Stevens does for his project Good Movies As Old Books: He envisions some of his favorite movies as vintage books.

Mission Impossible, Parasite, Back to the Future, Pulp Fiction, Karate Kid, LaLa Land — these are just a few of the titles in Matt’s vintage book library. Complete with tears, coffee stains, and old price stickers, the mockups look super realistic, as if they had been sitting on a shelf for quite some time, a bit worn but well-loved. Eye candy at its finest. (cm)

7. Visual Guide To Eurovision

What started as a humble contest in 1956 is today a flashy audiovisual spectacle and one of the most anticipated live entertainment broadcasts: The Eurovision Song Contest. Every year, 200 million viewers watch as performers from 37 countries compete for the trophy. So, with the next Eurovision Song Contest coming up on May 13–17 in Switzerland, how about a bit of Eurovision nerdiness?

In 2023, Reuters published a visual guide to Eurovision that grants interesting insights into the contest’s history. It highlights famous faces, explores set design over the decades, and shares stats on the victories. And, of course, the songs deserve a special place in the guide, too: Reuters created an audio archive for each country that analyzes and compares how each song measures against the rest. A great example of visual storytelling, not only for Eurovision fans. (cm)

8. Recently Published Books 📚

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.

In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?

Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
Check out all books →

Meet our newest book: Success At Scale by Addy Osmani. Get the book or browse the complete library.

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

April 29, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #505

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