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A Closer Look Inside Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine sets the industry standard for web design. The site has published over 650 articles which have received more than 114,000 comments. One article alone received 9,000 comments. The site currently is ranked 1,500 on Alexa. Given the enormous popularity of the website, it seems as if many aspects of Smashing Magazine are not very well known. Who started Smashing Magazine? How did it rise to popularity so quickly? What else are the founders up to? These are just a few of the questions I hope to answer in this article.

The logical first place to look for these answers is their About page. A look at the top of Smashing Magazine shows that there doesn’t seem to be one. The categories include “Home, Graphics, Showcases, Inspiration, Fonts, How-To, CSS, Tools, Freebies, Tutorials, Jobs and Forum” but no About. The link to their About page is actually on the very bottom of the site, and it does not read “About” or “About Us” but rather “Smashing Media GmbH”.

Not a very prominent location for their About page. The page is actually very informative and gives a brief history of Smashing Magazine. Smashing Media GmbH, it turns out, is the company that owns Smashing Magazine. The blog was founded by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz, but is now run by several people.

I found it interesting that their About page has only 12 comments, significantly less then any article on their website. Reading their About page left me wanting to know more about Smashing Magazine, its founders and everyone involved with the operation. To learn more I went to Smashing Magazine’s first article, written by “Smashing Editorial”.  The article is much shorter than their current articles, only has 10 comments, includes a typo and only has 8 diggs. None the less, the element Smashing Magazine seems to be founded on is still there -free. The original article lists places web developers can go to get free web-tools, software, and tutorials.

A quick google search landed me on Sven Lennartz’s Technorati page. He has two blogs listed, Smashing Magazine and Dr. Web Magazin. If you look at the bottom of the page, you will see Dr. Web is owned by Smashing Media GmbH. The site is also in German. To get a better look at the site, I put it into Google translator. The page does not translate very well, but well enough for me to get the idea that it is the most popular web design site in Germany. The site has an Alexa rank around 5,000, but a rank of 342 in Germany.

I found it interesting that this website was actually founded before Smashing Magazine. Dr. Web’s first article was October 11, 1999, where as Smashing Magazine’s first article was October 9th, 2006. According to the site, Dr. Web’s income comes from advertising and the “Dr. Web Plus Subscription”, which can be purchased for 79 pounds and gives readers access to exclusive material. It is interesting that Dr. Web relies on subscriptions for its income, whereas Smashing Magazine prides itself on giving things away for free.

Smashing Magazine’s other founder, Vitaly Friedman, has his own personal blog as well. The domain is http://www.alvit.de/blog/ and it is ranked 46,000 on Alexa. (By the way, I know Alexa is not very accuruate, but it does give a base of comparison.) Lennartz’s blog is not updated very often, its last update was in August. The site gives us some insight into the life of one of SM’s founders.

The site explains that “Vitaly Friedman a freelancing web designer from Saarbruecken, Germany, who creates simple, accessible and user-friendly web design.” Which explains why Dr. Web is in German. Interestingly, Smashingmagazine includes a link to Dr. Web in their blogroll, but does not provide a link to Friedman’s blog.

The blog links to another site owned by Vitaly Friedman which includes his biography. Apparantly Friedman is fluent in German, Russian and English. What is even more impressive, is that Fridman’s birthday is February 8th 1985, which makes him only 24 years old. I found this post, located on his second website, inspiring.

“It doesn’t happen too often, but it happens. Once, being inspired by your own imagination, you take a pencil in your hand. You see blurred images running over and over again in your head. You release your spirit of inspiration. Unexpectedly you experience an irresistible desire to transform your abstract ideas into real, concrete and, more significantly, unique objects. Of course, you can’t resist. You don’t even want to resist. And you create. However, while you are giving life to your ideas you unconsciously expect the others to see in them what you’ve seen in your mind.

Therefore, it isn’t enought to create. It is extremely important to create, being led not only by your imagination, but also by your sense of reality. Therefore you have to makeit elegant, accurate, informative, readable and understandable. No coolness, no pomposity. Do it just the way it is supposed to be done. Therefore you examine your inspiration with regard to the understanding of the others.

Therefore you lend your objects some qualities which are likely to be understood and accepted. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of your creation is given the highest priority. It just feels just good to be different. It feels good to know that your ideas are different. It just feels good.” (Vitaly Friedman, www.alvit.de/vf) Unlike Smashing Magazine articles, which are covered in comments, this post has yet to receive one comment.

Another interesting fact about Vitaly Friedman is that he wrote a book when he was 7 years old. “I’ve written my first – and so far the only – book in 1992; I was 7 years old then. The book consists of about 90 hand-written pages. Actually it is the story about two moles and their faithful, devoted friends, plunging into the depths of adventures in order to find a mysterious, hidden, buried and highly valuable treasure in an abandoned cave.” (Vitaly Friedman, www.alvit.de/vf)

A look at the post Smashing Magazine’s 2nd Anniversary, gives us some additional insight into Smashing Magazine and its rise to fame. “To celebrate our anniversary, we could do any number of things. For instance, we could organize a huge giveaway—as we did one year ago—but, of course, bigger and more overwhelming. However, we won’t do that; after all, we’re giving away stuff every week and we have many contests where our readers can win truly smashing prizes. (New contests are already on their way.)

Instead, we could share some insight about the highlights of Smashing Magazine over the last 12 months: an exploding number of page views, hundreds of thousands of backlinks, numerous testimonials and rewarding ad revenues. But we would probably sound like show-offs and we can’t afford to do that; after all, we have only published 301 posts so far.Another possibility would be to discuss our plans for the future.

What’s happening behind the scenes? What’s in the works? We could even share some top-secret information about the planned Smashing Book Series or new Smashing Forum. However, we won’t do that, because nobody can predict how successful those will really be.” This quote is a great example of a few things which I think are key to Smashing Magazine’s success.

The first has already been discussed-giving things away for free. As they mention here, SM was founded on giving away things for free. From hosting contests, to designing and giving away icons, to providing information – SM does it all for free. The next thing SM does exceptionally well is expand into new territory. At the time this post was written, their forum was still in the making, which turned out to be very successful.

The point is that Smashing Magazine’s primary product is information through their articles, but they are always getting into something new. They created a forum, a job board, unique RSS icons, countless contests, posters and they are in the process of creating a book. In their About Us page, they mentioned that their biggest failure was the creation of the Smashing Magazine cartoon.

The fact that they created a Smashing Magazine cartoon further proves my point. It seems as if there is absolutely nothing that Smashing Magazine won’t try, and the creativity that comes with their ventures is absolutely amazing. Yet at the same time, the magazine always expresses such modesty. On another note, While researching, I found a short blog article written by one of the web designers who was picked as a winner of the poster giveaway contest.

Since giving away things for free has been so important at Smashing Magazine, I decided to go through their articles and explore their history of giving things away. They started off by compiling lists of where web designers could get things for free, not by providing things for free themselves. They started off with a lot of articles that featured free fonts. They also posted quite a few articles compiling different resources where web designers could go to get free icons.

There first major contest was the Smashing Magazine Logo Contest. 192 people participated in helping Smashing Magazine come up with a new logo in hopes of winning a SimpleTech external hard drive. However, their first logo contest did not come without controversy. On March 14th, 2007 at 2:13 A.M. a user by the name of jwo left a comment pointing Smashing Magazine toward this link, and accusing Smashing Magazine of soliciting spec work.

The founders quickly responded with a comment saying “Thanks, jwo: we respect your position.” Jwo’s comment turned the comment section of the contest into an ethical debate regarding logo contests, ending with jwo’s commenting privileges being revoked. Despite the contraversy, the logo contest ended up being very successful, with the winner of the contest announced in the post Winners of the Logo Contest.

Despite Smashing Magazine’s continued success, comments from critics caused SM’s staff to post the article 8 Things You Should Know About Smashing Magazine. The article explains that people have been accusing Smashing Magazine of stealing content from Dr. Web and of manipulating Digg. SM uses the article to clear up the misconceptions about their work. Smashing Magazine’s first giveaway was called the Smashing 1st Anniversery Giveaway and it took place on September 6th, 2007.

The article accumulated almost 2,000 comments and featured massive prize giveaways. On September 7th, 2007, SM gave away its first free products developed exclusively for SM in the article Smashing Freefont and WordPress Theme. The free products were a free font and word press theme designed specifically for SM to commemorate their 1st anniversary. From this article onward, Smashing Magazine continues to develop excellent products to give away to its audience free of charge.

Smashing Magazine’s About Us page lists their regular authors as “Steven Snell, Jacob Gube, Vailancio Rodrigues, Jean-Baptiste Jung, Chris Coyier, Noura Yehia, Aquil Akhter, Danny Outlaw, Paul Boag, Chris Spooner, Dmitry Fadeyev, Cameron Chapman, Glen Stansberry and Matt Cronin”.

Steven Snell runs Vandelaydesigns, Jacob Gube runs Sixrevisions, Jean-Baptiste Jung runs Catswhocode, Chris Coyier runs Css-tricks, Noura Yehia runs Noupe, Danny Outlawy runs Outlawdesignblog, Paul Boag runs Boagworld, Chris Spooner runs Chrisspooner, Dmitry Fadeyev runs Usabilitypost and Glen Stansberry runs Lifedev. Notice any patterns there? Every single one of these websites is a major power player in the web design blog world today.

Smashing Magazine has influenced millions of designers around the world. It has paved the way for web design blogs everywhere. Its author’s are some of the most influential and successful names in web development. Its success is unprecedented and its founders seem like amazing people. After taking a closer look at Smashing Magazine, I appreciate their efforts and everything they have done even more. Thank you Smashing Magazine!

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