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June 8 was National Get Outdoors Day. Did you miss it? I did -- and chances are, you did, too. In 2012, out of the 313 million people in the United States, 70,000 participated. That's .0002 percent.
National Get Outdoors Day. Let's think about that.
Our nation's indoor-dwelling denizens, like you and me, have such a dearth of outside activity that a coalition of people and organizations banded together to get us to go outside. These folks tempted us with geocaching, bike clinics, fly-fishing lessons, hikes, canoeing, rock climbing and fairs in parks all over the country.
By many standards, these events were deemed a success. People went outdoors. Awareness was raised. People felt energized and happy. All good things.
But why aren't we outside anyway?
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Today is the day when it all started — the day when this little website launched back in 2006. Today, we celebrate our seventh anniversary, and you, dear readers, are the ones who have made it possible and kept us going.
Sorry about that heavy 0.5Mb GIF, but after all it’s our little birthday today and this GIF has been circling around the office for ages now.
A couple of months ago, I was on a night train on my way to one of those countless Web design conferences. Being offline with a ridiculous roaming rate is always a good excuse to get some work done, and the music streaming from my good ol’ headphones helped me to focus on the draft of the chapter I was reviewing for our upcoming book.
At a late stop, a dark-haired guy in his 30s stepped into my coach, politely asking whether the seat next to me was taken, then carefully placing his bag right next to mine. From his bag, he pulled out his laptop, his Moleskine and a set of exquisite Japanese pens — ones you wouldn’t find in any regular stationery shop. He looked like an artist at first glance, but at the same time was running Coda on his laptop.
Once he had everything in place, he pulled out a few books from his bag — all of the usual suspects, I assumed: a couple of Five Simple Steps books, a few printouts with sketches and mind maps, some A Book Apart volumes. Then I kept my breath for a moment — I suddenly glimpsed our very own Mobile Book, still neatly and tightly packed and wrapped.
You see, I’ve never seen someone read our books before then. You know how it is: You create something, send it into the wilderness of the Web, only to be surprised when you discover that people out there actually use this thing whose trail wanders from tweet to tweet, from one designer to the next.
Best things always happen to you when you don’t expect them at all. A random conversation at any point of time can change and redefine everything. (Image credit: Duane Romanell)
I struck up a conversation with my neighbor, asking him his name and where he comes from, whether he is an artist and what he does for a living, what it’s like to be a freelancer, and what the industry is like in general. He replied eagerly, and so the conversation led from design to development to culture to UX to personal struggles and successes, as the train moved along in the dark night.
“So, how do you keep improving your skills?” I asked.
“You know, experimenting with stuff, playing around with what’s out there.”
“I guess going to conferences as well, then?”
“Yep, that too. And then there is this pretty cool magazine. It’s called Smashing.”
I smiled, resisting the urge to say something.
At some point, the conversation drifted off, and I returned to my editing duties, while my neighbor started drawing in his Moleskine, jumping from one Japanese pen to another as the light was dimming. Suddenly, he slowly leaned towards his bag, reached for the Mobile Book and started examining it. He unwrapped the book slowly and gently leafed through its pages. He kept turning the book from one side to another, helped only by the flagging light from the side of the coach. Not long after he unwrapped it, I could hear a page flip every two minutes as my neighbor was reading the book.
I couldn’t look away. The book we’d been working for almost 10 months was actually being read by someone right in front of me. At this point, I knew almost every single page of the book by heart, and I knew exactly which pages contained grammar or spelling mistakes that our readers had flagged. I didn’t say anything, though — of course.
As the time passed and I continued editing the chapter, I kept hearing the pages flip. The coach was silent and almost empty, yet this little whisper of flipping was full of something… remarkable and meaningful — something that I would remember for a long, long time after that trip.
I spent almost the whole night editing that one monolithic chapter, finishing just before the sun rose, as my neighbor continued flipping through the book every couple of minutes. I will never forget how, upon closing my laptop, I realized that even hours later the Mobile Book was still there, serving its purpose as the night wore on.
Since then, I always remember how worthwhile and empowering every single minute we’ve invested in Smashing Magazine felt in those few hours on the train.
This little website was launched exactly seven years ago today. We didn’t have an ambitious goal. We didn’t have a master plan. We just wanted to do what matters to us and provide value to our colleagues, fellows designers and developers out there. That train trip of mine is one of the reasons we are still doing it today. The trip throughout all these seven years changed everything for me, and these years still drive us in new directions and towards new challenges. And for this I am eternally, eternally grateful.
These seven years have changed everything because what we do does matter after all, and because you matter to us.
We put our heart and soul into producing books that we love and that you will hopefully love, too. Good is not good enough, and we do everything we can to create beautiful and valuable artefacts of their time and keep them affordable to everyone worldwide.
To celebrate our little day today, we have prepared a little something for you. Well, obviously we can’t buy a round of beer for you just yet, but we do have something a bit more… permanent and special: a Smashing stress relief ball. That, and of course, for any printed book you grab, the international shipping is on us this week. But hey, don’t worry, no strings attached.
This adorable little fleecy fellow is super squishy and will put a smile on anyone’s face. Cody is a goodie that’s most certainly nice to have for your desk; he’s a great listener and an efficient stress absorber. Price is $7 (7€), with free shipping. You can also print your own Cody (PDF), you know. We’ll be giving away Codys to 30 people who comment on this post.
Our last Smashing Book contains practical coding and design techniques and features contributions from Aarron Walter, Rachel Andrew, Lea Verou, Christian Heilmann, Andy Clarke and Dmitry Fadeyev. If you want to know how to design websites today, don’t miss this bundle. Two damn good printed books and two eBooks in one fell swoop. Price is $27 (27€), with free shipping.
Here is a bundle of our two most recent books, which complement each other well. The Smashing Book 3 provides insight into the general design and coding workflow, while The Mobile Book has a strong focus on mobile techniques and strategies, the mobile landscape and mobile UX. That’s two high-quality print books and four eBooks in one fell swoop. Price is $47 (47€), with free shipping.
In all, we’ve released five printed books, all carefully edited and thoroughly reviewed according to the rigorous quality control that Smashing Magazine’s online articles are known for. The books cover the various areas of Web design and development and have come to be regarded as valuable, high-quality books for Web professionals. Price is $77 (77€), with free shipping.
The journey has just begun. We have a lot more in store, and we aren’t afraid of new challenges. In fact, we are happy to take this journey with you. A huge thank you to you for being so helpful, engaging and supportive, and for staying with us all this time, and for reading our books on night trains. It means the world to us. You mean the world to us.
It’s time to make a wish and blow out the candles.
Happy Birthday, SmashingMag. Happy Birthday, everyone!
© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2013.
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One of the more ambitious conferences on the circuit, Reasons to be Creative was held this year on September the 2nd, 3rd and 4th.
Whilst most conferences focus on a single discipline, or audience type, ReasonsTo seeks to inspire creative change in all of our lives. With such an intangible aim, the danger would seem to be that all focus is lost. But this year’s eclectic mix of design, art and code came together over three days to present an aspirational and entirely coherent vision of the future of the design industry.
The ability of conference organiser Johnny Belmont to create such a mixture perhaps stems from the conference’s roots in the Flash community — it grew from the ashes of Flash on the Beach — which historically blended design, code and open sourcing like few technologies before or since.
Sponsors included Adobe, whose Paul Trani kicked off presentations on Monday with a keynote focussed on Creative Cloud and tied into social engagement. We also got a great look at Adobe’s first foray into hardware: the Mighty and Napolean projects. The former is a pen for touch screen drawing, and the latter is a short ruler (the name provoking laughter from the mainly British audience) that enables straight lines to be drawn on touch devices. He finished up with a couple of sneaks.
Paul Trani ingratiates himself with the audience.
Monday’s talks included Grant Skinner, a familiar name amongst Flash developers and a veteran of the conference. He presented his career, running through his freelance Flash years and on to HTML5, particularly HTML5 games. What was most interesting about Grant’s presentation was that he still believes Flash is a great tool. He concedes that it will take Adobe a couple of iterations to get it right, but expects the move away from the SWF format and the inclusion of tools such as his own create.js will ultimately secure the application’s future amongst web design tools.
Grant Skinner still loves Flash.
Monday afternoon saw Fabio Sasso of Google recount the tale of his studio in Brazil being robbed and the creative route that event forced him to take, culminating in the worldwide success of his blog, Abduzeedo.
Fabio Sasso’s formula for success.
The Reasons to be Creative conference is known for two signature types of presentation; the first is the Inspiration evening sessions in which attendees are provided with a free beer and a heavily subsidized bar, which leads to a somewhat lighter atmosphere.
Monday’s Inspiration session was delivered by Stefan Sagmeister and revolved around his upcoming project, the Happy Film. He covered meditation, cognitive therapy, medication and other routes to happiness; including, as you’ll see below, group singing.
Group singing is one way to increase happiness.
Tuesday’s keynote was presented by Andrew Spooner of Microsoft, who delved into the difficult area of sound design. Including another piece of audience participation demonstrating that sound travels faster than light — at least as far as our perceptions are concerned.
Science experiments with Andrew Spooner.
Delivering design with empathy was the subject of Aaron Gustafson‘s presentation. He argued the case for progressive enhancement, rather than graceful degradation and introduced the idea of progressive reduction, a technique in which an interface becomes increasingly simple as users learn how to manipulate it.
Aaron Gustafson discusses empathy.
Keir Whitaker shares tips for ecommerce sites.
ReasonsTo is split over three connected venues, so you can’t see everything. The best venue over the three days was the smallest and most intimate: the Studio; in which SapientNitro’s Ros Horner gave the most motivating talk of the event. Her exceptional body of work was covered, and she was enjoyably self-deprecating with regards to her own difficulties in staying inspired. She argued that too many designers produce derivative work because we all follow the same blogs, read the same books and admire the same work. Her advice was to get away, travel, work abroad or just change jobs; the change of perspective will improve your work. There was yet more audience participation as we were asked to write down and hand in a personal goal for the next 12 months, which will form the basis of her session next year.
Career advice from Ros Horner.
Tuesday’s Inspiration session was delivered by the extraordinary Erik Spiekermann, who seems to be on a one man quest to save designers from exploitation. He’s retiring from agency work next year and appears determined to safeguard the future of the industry before he goes. His session covered the unique culture he’s fostered at the studios he’s run over the last 40 years, advice on handling clients and of course, a look at some of his world-class typographic design.
Erik Spiekermann as Chairman Mao.
If the Adobe-sponsored beer of the night before was still in your system on Wednesday morning, you’d have had a great deal of difficulty keeping up with ReasonsTo’s second signature session: the Elevator Pitch. At this presentation, 19 speakers with no history of conference speaking were given 3 minutes to try and wow the audience. The three speakers voted the best by attendees will be invited back to present full sessions next year, and hopefully break onto the worldwide conference circuit.
Luke Murphy discussed web design in the context of other disciplines; Katherine Cory argued that we should support clients more; Chris Kelly presented the view from back-stage as one of the conference’s fantastic support staff; Darren Bennett discussed stories in web design; Wouter Verwierder talked about building a TV remote with JavaScript; Andy Croll argued for good email design; Neil Glenister talked about developing games with the Corona SDK; Jop Wielens talked about a cold-case game for the Dutch police; Hannah Yapp talked about the legal implications of spec work; Andy Sargeant talked about designers staying healthy; Daniel Jones showcased his work; Graham Odds showcased beautify.io; Chris Price explained Bitcoins in terms of Russian dolls; Rachel Shillcock asked us to become superheroes; Thomas Joos talked about making engaging experiences; Rita Mantler talked about augmented reality; Andrew Dobson talked about building a 3D printout of himself as Han Solo frozen in carbonite; Ollie Wells offered advice on beating the hump; and Christian Ortiz presented work from his graphic novel — all in less than an hour.
The elevator pitches.
Winner of best T-Shirt of the show went to Bruce Lawson, whose in-depth look at what’s next for web standards and cross device design, was one of the standout presentations. Bruce’s passion for responsive design was infectious and the overview of where it is headed covered everything from Flexbox to CSS units, element specific media queries, to probably the most pressing issue in responsive design: responsive images.
The future of web standards with Bruce Lawson.
Whilst many of the talks were purely inspirational in nature, many like Bruce’s and the presentation that followed him, Geri Coady‘s examination of design for color blindness, provided invaluable knowledge for designers. Geri’s presentation demonstrated the three kinds of color blindness and offered strategies for designing sites that don’t exclude the 5+% of the population affected.
Geri Coady demonstrates accessibility for the color blind.
Inside the conference there were times throughout the three days when you could almost feel the ideas sparking in the audience, and outside in Brighton’s North Laines street cafés were packed with attendees hurriedly scribbling into sketch books, updating social media, or engrossed in conversation.
Hellicar & Lewis talk about feedback loops.
James Paterson closes the show with some awesome animation.
The aim of Reasons to be Creative is to recharge creative batteries and inspire the next year of work, and it certainly did so. Find a slot in your schedule for next year’s conference — which is scheduled for September 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Speakers already confirmed for 2014 include Paula Scher, Sara Blake, Brosmind, Florian Schmitt, Jessica Walsh, James White and many more — I can highly recommend it.
Did you attend Reasons to be Creative 2013? Are you hoping to attend next year? Let us know in the comments.
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