Smashing Community Newsletter #1: Redesign, eBooks, Smashing Book 3

• By Smashing Newsletter Team
• January 29th, 2012
• 2 Comments

We are off to a great start in 2012 here at Smashing Magazine: a fresh user-friendly new look; improved access to our Smashing eBooks; and a lot of plans to achieve our new year’s resolution — which is to support and invest in our community.

The Responsive Redesign

We’ve been working over six months on the redesign of Smashing Magazine. We’ve spent months cleaning it up, sorting it out, categorizing, optimizing, revising and rethinking and we’re now very proud of the way the design has turned out. Many readers have asked us about the “key ingredient” to our new design.

The answer is simple: all design decisions have been dictated by our pursuit of optimal typographic measure (45–90 characters per line) for a convenient reading experience on every screen resolution. We’ve worked very hard to achieve optimal typography first and then built the layout around that. It was important for us to increase usability, visibility and accessibility for our content.

 
A heatmap of the Smashing Magazine’s front page before (on the left) and after the redesign (on the right).

The relaunch of Smashing Magazine has sparked quite a discussion in the community. Some of you feel that the design is “too responsive”, others feel that the ads are too prominent, but most of you liked the lean, clean new layout. We hope that the new design makes reading more enjoyable — which is what any online magazine should aspire to, right? We are still working on fixing minor bugs, and we’re continually testing minor layout changes. We encourage you to send us feedback or comments — we’d sincerely appreciate that!

Smashing eBooks in iTunes and on Amazon!

Smashing eBooks are available on Apple iTunes and Amazon. Our products in the Apple iBookstore are now available in 32 countries, a big jump from the initial six. Customers in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland can now shop for Smashing eBooks as easily as our customers in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France and Australia.

All Smashing eBooks are available in 26 stores in Apple iBooksstore

All Smashing eBooks are available on Amazon.

While you can buy Smashing eBook bundles at special prices in our Smashing Shop, single eBooks are now available only in Apple iBookstore and in Amazon Kindle Store:

We are very grateful for your trust and confidence in us, and we appreciate your loyal support. We will do our best to provide you with a convenient access to our articles and our eBooks in the future, too!

Smashing Book 3 Is Coming!

We’re very happy to finally announce that we’re working on the upcoming printed Smashing Book 3, a long-awaited successor of our bestselling printed Smashing Books 1 and 2. For the third book we have a truly remarkable line-up of authors, topics and designers that some of you may already know. We’re hoping to shake up the community a bit by making some bold and strong statements. More details will be revealed between February and April. But if you’ve seen our previous books, we’re quite sure that you won’t be disappointed with this third one!

Let’s Grab A Beer!

We’re continually searching out new locations for our meet-ups with our fantastic community. If you’d like us to come to your city (and perhaps even know or could arrange a venue for 50+ attendees), please get in touch – let’s grab a beer (or two)! We’ll certainly keep you posted of other smashing developments: there is a lot more to come out from us over the next months!

Thank you for reading and so long,
The Smashing Family