Founded in September 2006, Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information for designers and Web developers. Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in Web development: clearly, precisely and regularly. We try to convince you not with the quantity but with the quality of the information we present. That’s what makes us different. We smash you with the information that makes your life easier. Really.

Why Smashing Magazine? Well, why not? We smash our readers with information that is useful to them, even if they haven’t realized it yet.

Who are we?

Smashing Magazine is maintained by:

• Sven Lennartz, the owner and editor-in-chief of the German Dr. Web Magazine.
• Vitaly Friedman, the creator of Web Developer’s Handbook and the author of Praxisbuch Web 2.0
  

Contact us!

• You can contact us via the form.
• We read through each and every email we receive, and we try to answer every email. However, it’s not possible to answer all of them.
• You can also use our postal address:
  c/o Dr. Web Magazin Sven Lennartz
  Moislinger Allee 22a
  23558 Lübeck
  Germany

Advertise on Smashing Magazine?

We offer some attractive ad spots. Please send a brief email to Michael Dobler. We’ll be in touch shortly. Please note that we would never publish information about paid content or write reviews about you, the advertiser, or your products unless we found them to be useful to Web developers. The articles published on Smashing Magazine are objective; the quality of each article is defined by the extent of its utility to our readers. We respect our readers and protect their interests. This is the main principle of our work.

Sponsors

Special thanks go to the following ad partners:

• PSD to HTML: You Design - We XHTML / CSS
• W3 MARKUP - PSD to HTML / CSS & Software Implementation for your designs
• Techsmith - Share video, share anything
• Techsmith Morae - Usability Testing for Software and Websites
• Techsmith Camtasia Studio - Train. Present. Persuade.
• Flash Design Software - Creating a Stunning Website is Insanely Easy
• activeCollab - Project Management & Collaboration Tool
• Mosso - the hosting cloud
• crestock.com - creative stock images
• Audio Jungle - Royalty Free Music Loops
• FlashPageFlip.com - Best advanced dynamic page flip flash engine

Behind the scenes

Shaun Ellis from the Juxtaviews team recently interviewed and featured Smashing Magazine on the Juxtaviews website. The article gives you some insight into the way we work, how we come up with topics to write about and how we communicate with our readers.

Excerpts from the article:

“…The basic idea behind both Web Developer’s Handbook and Smashing Magazine is the same. You see, what I created with Web Developer’s Handbook was an organized collection of references one should always have ready to hand developing web-sites. Smashing Magazine goes a slightly different road - we find some topic we’re excited about and search in the Web for professional references or solutions for given problems.”

“…Source for inspiration? Mostly that are just problems we have and solutions we find during design process (my case) or publishing new articles in Dr. Web (Sven’s case). As I’ve mentioned before, it’s nice to have useful references in one single place. For instance, collecting information for the post 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen had cost us a lot of time, but now I don’t have to Google any more if I am looking for some beautiful Wordpress theme. Doing something for yourself and presenting it then to the public is simple, but it can be very useful - in our case particularly for web-developers. Actually, I was just looking for some useful stuff for a web-project I am working on right now.”

“…So our basic aim is to help web-developers get the information they are actually looking for. We want to make sure that the valuable information we have, collect, or stumble upon is available for people who might actually use it for their creative works.”

“…It takes many hours of hard work to write the articles which are already published. All resources are hand-picked and selected manually. We want to achieve the highest quality content and present it to a broad audience.”

“…In fact, we put a lot of thinking in before posting every single article. We try to provide what we personally understand to be quality material. We present information which we ourselves would like to bookmark once it appears online. Ironically, if I am looking for something in the Web, I go to Smashing magazine myself, because it’s handy to keep all the useful stuff in one place.”

The full interview can be found in the article Smashing Magazine Interview.

We’ve also been featured on Fadtastic: Andrew Faulkner asked us a few questions that resulted in the quite comprehensive Fadtastic Interview With Smashing Magazine. Some excerpts:

“…Every article posted on Smashing Magazine has to be useful. The degree of utility defines the nature of our content. With every post we publish we try to smash our readers with the information that will make their life easier. This is our tagline, our basic aim and this is what we’ve been doing over the last 12 months.”

“…The topics always result from the recent problems we’ve been recently dealing with. Once we’ve stumbled upon some problem we don’t know the answer to, or have found something useful / interesting, we start to search for answers and related resources. This usually results in comprehensive articles about a given topic. Why would someone do this? Basically, because we are extremely curious.”

“…Cameron Moll said once: “Don’t design to decorate, design to communicate”. This is extremely important. Design is a mean of communication, it doesn’t serve the purpose to simply exist - indeed, it should be based upon the usability layer. It is important that more designers realize that usable and functional web-sites build the foundation of successful web-sites. Gorgeous design can wait. We, at Smashingmagazine.com, still don’t have it. We’re not sure we’ll ever have.”

The full interview can be found in the article Interview With Smashing Magazine. BTW: we are on Web Trend Map 3

Testimonials

“If you’re even remotely into design and have never checked out Smashing Magazine I either feel sorry for you or am horribly jealous of all the joy you are about to experience.  Be prepared to feel like a kid in a candy store.” (Andrew Lindstrom July/08)

“Initially I just flicked through a few pages, but after spending some time there I am simply amazed at the high and even production quality material people make available.” (Ira Lukhezo July/08)

“Their magazine is something I read religiously. They have so many great articles that I find useful and I often go there when I need inspiration. I hope they continue to succeed in all their goals.” Aikyrie at Problogger in May/08)

“This on-line magazine rocks!!! Whether you like design or are addicted to the internet like myself, Smashing Magazine is a place that truly fuels the creative engine. I check it out every couple of days and they are always giving away free icons or fonts.. wallpapers and now they are giving away books to people for just leaving a nice comment! I also find great tutorials here. If you read this please take my advice and check them out! I give them two virtual thumbs up! Click here to visit Smashing Magazine, the online magazine about the “better internet”.” Michael Parenteau (June/08)

“SMASHING MAGAZINE is a FIND on it’s OWN!!! It’s LOADED with info on soo many great things…from fonts like noted above, to photoshop tutorials, to inspirational stuff, to web design info, etc!! It’s REALLY terrific!! You should really RSS it!” (Jessica Strickland January/08)

“Lennartz and Friedman have taken list making and research to a new level to produce precisely what the masses love. As their success grows and grows, immitators are beginning to appear meeting with some success themselves, but for now, nobody does it like Smashing.” NxE’s Fifty Most Influential Bloggers (September 07).”

“Lists are a firm favourite on the Net, as a regular glance at the Digg home page will tell you. What gives us an idea of just how popular some lists are is the fact that Smashing Magazine is being touted by eBizMBA as the 25th most popular blog on the planet! and this is after only one year online for the lords of the lists for web dev resources. Outstanding!” (Quoi9 / August 07)

“Sites like Smashing Magazine have created a name for itself, very quickly, by publishing content that can’t easily be duplicated. They create massive lists of sites and resources that take a lot of time to put together. Those stand out.” (Copyblogger / August 07)

“How the hell…. can you NOT love SmashingMagazine?” (p0tent1al commenting on Digg / August 07)

“I’m a big fan of Smashing Magazine and appreciate the time and effort that goes into researching and writing their often exhaustive posts on web design tools, resources and techniques.” (Smiley Cat / May 07)

“If you only have time to read one blog everyday, read mine :) If you have time for another one, throw in SmashingMagazine.com. This is a great blog that I stay for around 30 minutes upon my first visit!” (KC HUT / August 07)

“If you looked up “Useful” in the dictionary, you’d see a screenshot of SmashingMagazine there next to it. Not only do they showcase great designs, but if you’re a web designer you’ll find their CSS tips and tricks, layout guides and other articles will have you itching to try new things with your next design.” (Freelance Switch / May 07)

“Hey, Smashing folks… you guys really do rock!” (Don Giannatti / August 07)

“Smashing Magazine is an extremely popular design and development blog which features rich content for geeks. Thousands of people subscribe and read Smashing Magazine daily.” (Dot Sauce / June 07)

“Perhaps you are familiar with the blog SmashingMagazine, if not, suffice it to say that if you looked up giant linkbait lists in the dictionary, the Smashing logo would be right there next to it.” (North x East / June 07)

“these guys just plain rock and roll.” (juxtaviews / August 07)

So what now?

And finally, some interesting website suggestions. Just for fun:

• Caligraft
  The main idea behind this exhibition is to explore a new dimension of textual representation. The designers tried to consider the different possibilities of glyph, words and text representation and distribution in space and time.
• Dreamlines
  Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association.
• Nobody here
  Creative, inspiring, unusual.
• Netdisaster
  Netdisaster is a web filter; it’s a fun toy only. The user chooses a target website. Netdisaster overlays an animation that simulates the destruction of the target site by a disaster. The animation can go on automatically, or via mouse control.
• Amaztype
  A visual book search on Amazon.