Coinciding with Smashing Magazine’s first anniversary (hop over there for their birthday giveaway), we catch up with Vitaly Friedman:

Vitaly, welcome to fadtastic. Please say a few things about yourself and Smashing Magazine.

Andrew, first of all the Smashing Magazine team would like to thank you for the opportunity to be featured on Fadtastic. We really appreciate the work you do and your tremendous efforts to help designers and web-developers out there. We highly appreciate the quality and utility of web content and this is why we highly respect your work.

The Smashing Magazine (www.smashingmagazine.com) is an online magazine dedicated to designers and web-developers. Its main purpose is to deliver high quality content related to web design regularly. It is maintained by Vitaly Friedman, a freelancing web-developer, a book author (www.praxisbuch-web20.de) and the creator of the Web Developer’s Handbook (www.alvit.de/handbook) and Sven Lennartz, the chief-editor of the German web design magazine Dr. Web (www.drweb.de), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Christiane Rosenberger helped us over the first 6 months; since April Michael Dobler takes care of marketing and advertising.

So what is the main idea behind Smashing Magazine? It’s simpler than you probably think. We never offer average content. In selecting the topics for our articles we never compromise one basic principle: we try to deliver the best possible information about a given topic and present it in the most comprehensive and usable way. Being web-developers ourselves, we try to select only those subjects or resources which we consider as being useful and/or interesting for web-developers. We would never write “paid” articles and we would never try to publish some articles just to get on the front page of popular social networks. Each and every one of our 115 articles is published only because we ourselves might look back on them in the future. As might you, since you are a web-developer. Quality is more important than quantity - whatever you do.

This has a simple advantage: once we need some information about a given topic, we go to Smashing Magazine by ourselves, just because we’ve (hopefully) already covered all the essential facts we should probably know about it - take an article about CSS Specificity or CSS Floats, for instance.

In fact, every reference we point to has to be considered as a direct suggestion from ourselves - there is no coincidence in the choice of references. Of course, sometimes we make mistakes but we always try to check them immediately if we’re pointed to some inconvenient issues. For instance, in our article about Google Pagerank some users pointed us to some mistakes we’ve made. We’ve immediately admitted the mistakes, corrected the article and thanked to these people in public.

There is nothing more valuable than constructive criticism which is basically the only thing which makes our content better, our magazine more useful and our efforts more convenient. We try to thank to every reader who criticizes us - if there is something to criticize - however due to the flood of e-mails recently it is becoming harder all the time.

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.

We cover many areas of design and web-development. Partly it is the basics of web development (tutorials, theory behind CSS etc.), but also productivity tips for designers and bloggers (cheatsheet, hotkeys, link building), typography and graphics (fresh free fonts and icons).

We also try to present the best blog and site designs in our design showcase. And the best resources of the month are covered in our monthly “Best Of”-posts.

We’re here to talk web design and trends, but first, we have to talk about Digg. I regularly see front-page articles from SM on Digg - how important is this to you and how do you keep getting ‘Dugg’?

We’ve been analysing comments to our posts after Digg effects (over 40 so far) - there are some comments with extremely useful tips and criticism, but many are neither concrete nor helpful nor somehow useful. We highly appreciate the work Digg team does, but its users aren’t always the audience we address our articles to. Still we appreciate diggers’ attention to our site and we even have a Digg-button for users willing to support us.

The useful consequence of Digg-effects is that more and more web-developers all around the world get to know us. This is, of course, important to us. Many Digg users are, however, tired of us. We are often called “Digg spammers”, but actually we can’t do anything about it - if our readers digg us, showing that they respect our work, this is their right to do so. Every vote shows us that we’re doing a pretty good job and we’ve learned to accept it as a support of what we do and how we do it.

Most articles are getting digged “automatically” - the key is not some clever algorithm we use, but the utility of the content we offer.

A common trend among bloggers is blogger apathy - struggling to think up content for the blog. You regularly pick great subjects to ‘Smash’ - here does the inspiration come from?

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. The showcase of modern data visualization methods has been created just because we were extremely impressed by Infographics.com and methods presented there. So we’ve searched for further methods - for three-four days in a row. The search was worth it. Take a look what we’ve come out with in the end. It’s extremely fascinating to observe that even University professors of data visualization have found something useful in our research. This is what makes our site going on; this is what helps us to maintain the quality of our work.

Besides, we actively observe what is currently happening on the Web. We regularly scan through dozens of related magazines and blogs to find important issues in modern web-development and present interesting standpoints in our articles.

Of course, our readers help us a lot, too. Without them Smashing Magazine wouldn’t be the magazine it is now. The ideas for many articles have resulted from the interests/problems of our readers who asked us to do a research about some topics via e-mail. We’d like to thank them for helping us making our content more useful and interesting.

From your site design, it’s obvious that the content is meant to be the stuff that stands out. Do you believe that content is sometimes not given enough thought in web design, even though it’s surely the most important element of a page? What’s your secret in showing off the content?

Content is the key to success. A successful web-site doesn’t have to be beautiful; it has to work well (from the usability + functionality point of view) and it must offer valuable content. From the very beginning we didn’t want to impress our visitors with our site design but with the content presented on Smashing Magazine. It may sound a little bit provocative, but we didn’t really care about design then. We’ve adapted one of the first minimalistic Wordpress themes we’ve found and there it was ready to be used. On the other hand we’ve been trying to present the high quality material from the very first post we’ve published almost one year ago. Over the year we’ve developed our layout, made some important changes to improve the site structure and the quality of content. Our articles have become more structured, our research more profound. We’ve also started to use more visuals to communicate ideas in a more effective way.

However, the design hasn’t really improved that much.

And yes, content is sometimes not given enough thought in web design. A typical mistake many designers do is designing a layout from sketch having literally no idea about the content of the web-site. Design has to support the content, not the other way around. It is extremely important to be aware of the content before starting to work on your first drafts; only this way you can achieve the best level of visual communication and present the content in a more thought-out and effective way. The content is the profound foundation of every web-site, it makes a solid and direct communication between the site and its visitors possible.

And since we are talking about content… let us clarify one important thing: we’ve been often criticized for being a List-Blog - creating some primitive “top” lists which attract visitors’ attention and get us to the front pages of user-driven news communities. Many consider that we’re highly overrated because we just compile lists from basic google search results.

You decide whether it’s true or not. However, it wasn’t our aim to exploit “top” lists to get to where we are now. The only thing we’ve been doing was doing extensive researches (from 3-5 days up to several weeks) to present the useful information we’ve found as simple and as usable as possible. Lists are one effective way to do exactly this. So why don’t use them? Just to give you an example: the article that showcases 53 CSS-based techniques could be given any other name; however users are likely to remember the title quicker as, let’s say, “Some pretty useful css-techniques”. In fact, it’s enough to type “53 css” in Google to get to the page. Simple and quick, isn’t it? That’s what that’s all is about, actually.

Could it be argued that Smashing Magazine’s format is the new ‘directory’ - meaning that once people searched directories for, let’s say, great fonts whereas now blog posts like yours are preferred? If so, why do you think this change has occurred?

It’s really hard to say. On the one side there are literally thousands of web-sites related to every possible given topic, so it is really extremely hard to get an overview of what is really useful and what is not. The search is time-consuming and the results don’t always meet your expectations, so it’s always nice to have some folks doing this job for you - searching for the useful information, so you don’t have to - regularly. So “experts-driven” directories might turn out to be the panacea of web search, but with the dynamics we have currently on the Web it’s important to update the information all the time - so it’s getting more complex. Every research we made was the “momentum” research. Some data remains useful for a long period of time (in fact, we try to make sure that every article we publish will remain useful even two-three-ten years later), some doesn’t. We see it as our job to find and present what is useful now and what might still be useful in the future.

However, letting these folks to do the job, you have to trust these folks and their qualification; you have to be sure that they really present optimal results. We try to do our best - our visitors decide whether we’ve succeeded in doing so or not. But again - some prepared data is always better than hundreds of pages stored somewhere in the Web, isn’t it?

On the other hand, who are we actually to decide what’s good and what’s not? We use our experience to select the information *we think* is extremely valuable and useful. Almost 30.000 RSS-subscribers seem to trust us. We appreciate their trust. And we’ll do everything to meet their expectations in the future.

And finally, the classic fadtastic question: If you had a big red button in front of you that could eliminate any design trend in an instant, what would you choose and why?

Used moderately and effectively, every design trend can be used in a proper way. Trends come and go, so the “design evolution” will create new trends we probably will hate over a long period of time anyway. So maybe it’s more sound to approach the question from another point of view: we would use the red button to make sure web-sites are getting more convenient regarding usability. 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.

Thank you so much for those insights, Vitaly. Much appreciated. Have fun with the one-year celebration. Readers, feel free to ask questions.

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