March 25, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #500
This newsletter issue was sent out to 191,579 subscribers on Tuesday, March 25, 2025.
Editorial
All of us have plenty of useful bookmarks — for tools, resources, guidelines, to-dos, and anything in between. If we need something specific, we search. If we need to explore a broad topic, we might use an AI-powered search. But sometimes what we need is different: a curated selection of topics that might be relevant to us.
In times of AI, human curation by experts has become the only reliable way to filter out all the noise and all the buzz of AI-generated content. And in this newsletter, we highlight just that — useful hubs, curated by humans, from UX research and Product Management to Content Design and Storytelling. We hope you’ll find it useful.
And here’s our latest line-up of online workshops and conferences we’ve been preparing:
- Cognitive Biases 101: How They Impact Users, Research, and Teams Free with Stéphanie Walter (April 10)
- Figma Unlocked: What’s New from Config Free with Christine Vallaure (May 23)
- SmashingConf Freiburg (Sept 8–11, 2025),
- SmashingConf NYC (Oct 6–9).
- Friendly video courses on UX, with Vitaly Friedman
Happy designing, everyone — and sending a lot of good vibes and positive thinking your way!
— Vitaly
1. UX Research Practice
Research is essential to creating a good user experience. It helps us uncover user needs and prevents us from basing our design decisions on assumptions, hunches, and guesses. Gregg Bernstein, user experience research leader and author of the book Research Practice, published his personal collection of research-related bookmarks in a Notion database.
The collection features more than 200 useful links, covering everything from recruiting, interviews, and documentation to prioritization, data analysis, and AI. Each bookmark comes with a short description and a tag to make it easier to find resources that are relevant to you. A great resource, whether you’re new to UX research or are looking to improve your workflow. (cm)
2. Design System Knowledge Base
What is the best way to organize Figma files? What are design tokens? How do you handle contributions and changes in a design system? These are just a few of the questions that the Design System Knowledge Base answers.
Romina Kavcic started building the knowledge base to open-source the many design-system-related questions that she receives every week. In the knowledge base, she not only provides her answers to each question but also shares community insights and links to resources, templates, articles, and videos. New questions and answers are added regularly. A treasure chest of design system expertise. (cm)
3. Storytelling Principles
How can we tell stories that matter, delight, offer value, and maybe even change the world? To help us communicate more effectively, Jeremy Connell-Waite, Communications Designer at IBM, condensed everything he learned about storytelling over the last twenty years into a set of nine principles, with video tutorials, scientific research, cheat sheets, inspirational keynotes, and reading lists.
Also part of Jeremy’s “Tell Better Stories” project are his One Pagers, hand-written and illustrated summaries of things he learned. The One Pagers explore everything from Walt Disney’s Imagineers to the Japanese principle Ikigai and what we can learn from how Ernest Hemingway or Taylor Swift tell stories. These are beautiful masterpieces, jam-packed with storytelling wisdom. (cm)
4. 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.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Theming Design Systems workflow
with Samantha Gordashko. Apr 8–23 - Cognitive Biases 101: How They Impact Users, Research, and Teams free
with Stéphanie Walter. Apr 10 - Designing Websites That Convert ux
with Paul Boag. April 28 – May 6 - The Secrets of Web Performance dev
with Ryan Townsend. May 7–21 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX
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 - Jump to all workshops →
5. Content Design Resources
Simple is often better. Particularly when it comes to writing. For the last couple of years, Iain Broome has been collecting the best resources on writing clear, accessible content. Now, he compiled his findings into a free, searchable, tagged directory of bookmarks so everyone can learn from them.
The directory includes more than 100 resources filed under 12 categories. They cover accessibility, content design and strategy, editing, style guides, user research, and more to help you ditch the jargon and write more clearly. Whether you want to learn how to write effective headings, how to run a tone of voice workshop with your team, or what you need to consider when designing content for people with limited English, Iain’s bookmarks have got you covered for sure. (cm)
6. Sustainable UX Tools And Resources
“Making sustainability default in all product design processes.” That’s the mission of the Sustainable UX Network (SUX). To make it easier for designers to find the right tool for their situation or context, SUX published the SUX Network, a resource collection all around sustainable design.
The collection features practical resources to support you in all phases of the design process, from strategy and discovery through definition and ideation to information architecture, UI design, testing, and analysis. The resources include practical tools, books, inspiring talks, communities, podcasts, case studies, courses, events, and more to help you incorporate sustainable UX into your work. (cm)
7. Product Management Resources
Do you want to improve your product management skills? Then Paweł Huryn’s huge collection of product management resources might be for you. The Product Compass Resources include product management books, videos, and software and highlight experts you might want to follow.
To dive deeper into the world of product management, Paweł also shares a product manager competencies map, product management skills assessments, infographics, templates, and an overview of product management courses and certificates. And if that’s not enough for you yet, there’s a paid version available, too, that gives you access to even more templates and resources. (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 →
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).
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