May 6, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #506
This newsletter issue was sent out to 190,200 subscribers on Tuesday, May 6, 2025.
Editorial
In times when we try to optimize and automate everything, there is one fine detail that we overlook: the power of emotional impact. The impact of empathy and the power of a truly magical user experience.
In this newsletter, we look at the beautiful world of UX and design — with a mixed bag of design experiments and UX efforts, from Swiss passport design to 3D data visualization.
Later this week and next month, we’ll be running a few new workshops — online and in-person in New York, and we thought that you’d like to join as well:
- 🌍 Online: Accessibility for Designers (June 16–24) with Stéphanie Walter
- 🌍 Online: How To Measure UX and Design Impact (May 12–20) with Vitaly Friedman
- 🇺🇸 New York (June 23): Design Patterns For Complex UIs and AI (in-person) with Vitaly Friedman
- 🇺🇸 New York (June 24): The New CSS Toolkit (in-person) with Kevin Powell
As we are venturing into in-person workshops and trainings, we’d sincerely appreciate you spreading the word with your friends and colleagues. Perhaps in a Slack/Teams channel, if possible? And: we absolutely can’t wait to see you there!
And now, let’s dive into the magical world of design!
— Vitaly
1. 3D Data Visualization
It’s probably no exaggeration to say that data visualization is an art. And even more so when you’re dealing with huge datasets. Now, imagine the following scenario: The NBA has 30 teams and 82 games per team during a season. What could a data visualization look like that visualizes every moment an NBA team was leading or trailing during the season? That’s exactly the challenge that Vinicius Sueiro decided to tackle.
For Hoop Hills, Vinicius designed a 3D interactive data visualization that, as the name implies, indeed looks like a hilly landscape that lets you explore the peaks and valleys of NBA games. You can select the team, opponent, season, kind of game (regular season, play-in, playoffs), period, and game result, and Hoop Hills visualizes every moment the team was leading or trailing. To gain a new perspective on the data, the data visualization can be turned and tilted in all directions. Impressive! (cm)
2. Quiet Hours
Bright lights, loud music, bustling crowds — all these things can turn shopping into a stressful rather than an enjoyable experience. Particularly for disabled and neurodivergent people or people with sensory sensitivities. Quiet hours in stores can be a way to minimize sensory overload, and more and more retailers are starting to embrace the concept.
Sephora UK, for example, recently announced quiet hours twice a week. During that time, they turn down the music, dial down screens, and let shoppers browse peacefully, with the staff being there to help if help is requested.
As Accessibility Marketer Kelly Chan points out, this move isn’t just about accessibility, it’s about empathy, inclusion, and the future of retail. A good reminder that people experience the world differently and that what works for some doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. Let’s keep this in mind for our work, too. (cm)
3. AI For Recommendation Systems
Netflix recently adopted foundation models in a completely new domain: to create a personal recommendation system architecture that assimilates information from both members’ interaction histories and Netflix’s content.
Borrowing insights from Large Language Models (LLMs), the new recommendation system aims to harness the vast scale of unlabeled user interaction data — with over 300 million users at the end of 2024, this means hundreds of billions of interactions, a dataset comparable in scale to the token volume of LLMs.
If you want to dive deeper into how it all works, the Netflix team published a comprehensive blog post, explaining their approach, the motivation and considerations behind it, and the challenges they faced. For a quick summary of the key challenges and benefits of using AI in this context, also be sure to check out David Sauerwein’s post. (cm)
4. Behind The Severance Opening Titles
Some series intros are just too good to be skipped. One such example is the title sequence to the Apple TV+ series Severance. Emmy-winning artist, director, and designer Oliver Latta shares a look behind the scenes and a small breakdown of the intro he created for season 2.
If you haven’t seen the series, Severance follows the employees of the biotechnology corporation Lumon Industries. All of them have undergone a medical procedure that takes the separation of work and life to dystopian extremes: While at the office, they don’t have any memories of their private life; outside of the office, they don’t have any memories of their job. The title sequence brings this dystopia to life in powerful, surreal images that, as Oliver Latta explains, symbolize the main character’s struggle to reclaim his identity. A work of art. (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.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. May 12–20 - Figma Unlocked: What’s New from Config UX
with Christine Vallaure. May 23–20 - Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 4–18 - Accessibility for Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Jun 16–24 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS DEV
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - Jump to all workshops →
6. Swiss Passport Design
Truly impactful design with a unique personality has gotten quite rare these days, with a lot of things looking a bit too similar and generic. But they do exist, those designs that are crafted with incredible care and that wake that spark that made you fall in love with design in the first place. The new Swiss passport introduced in 2022 is such a shining design star.
Created by Geneva-based design studio RETINAA, the passport honors the tradition of innovation in Swiss graphic arts. At the heart of the design are the Swiss landscape and cultural heritage. It depicts 3D-modeled landscapes, taking you on an imaginary journey along Switzerland’s watercourses, from the Alpine peaks to the valleys. Security features include contour lines revealing the country’s topography and cultural landmarks under ultraviolet light. A breathtaking piece of design work. (cm)
7. 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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