July 15, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #516
This newsletter issue was sent out to 188,694 subscribers on Tuesday, July 15, 2025.
Editorial
As we are chasing ways to boost our workflows, sometimes we overlook lovely little websites that have nothing to do with that. They exist just to put a smile on someones face, or spark our curiosity, or help us discover things we wouldn’t stumble upon otherwise.
We dedicate this issue to lovely little adventures on the web — small discoveries that have very little to do with product design or development, but often leave a lasting impression, because they are so unique and memorable.
On another note, we all know by now how strongly AI can influence our work, so we’ve decided to take a few hours and dig into the topic. We’ve invited three speakers who’ll speak on how AI can help you as a designer and/or developer, and where the developments of AI are leading. Jump to the details.
We hope that you’ll enjoy exploring the fun and useful gems in today’s newsletter; nothing too serious, and nothing too work-related. Happy browsing and exploration, everyone! 🎉🥳
— Vitaly
1. Reminiscing With Retro TVs
Remember the charm of analog television back in the day? Well, imagine traveling back in time in the comfort of your seat and computer in front of you. That’s exactly what Netflix engineer Joey Cato wanted to bring to life — by enabling users to leisurely flip through vintage content in a classic TV experience.
MyRetroTVs is a lovingly hand‑crafted digital time capsule—a playful, interactive journey through TV history. It simulates the experience of “channel-surfing” on vintage TVs, complete with authentic-looking controls and interfaces spanning decades from the 1950s to the 2000s — ideal for anyone seeking nostalgia, a history of TV culture, or a relaxing escape from modern media overload. (il)
2. Exploring Places With Hoodmaps
Planning to explore or move to a new city? What if you could not only navigate the streets but also see where hipsters, tourists, students, and professionals tend to hang out, while also surfacing quirky tags or local red flags? Well, Pieter Levels, a Dutch designer/developer, wanted to create just that — a platform that covers thousands of cities worldwide, with strong usage in places like NYC, London, Berlin, San Francisco, and more.
Meet Hoodmaps, a crowdsourced, interactive map that captures the “vibe” of neighborhoods through users’ eyes—a blend of social insights and cartography. Users can “paint” areas of a city in six colored categories to help indicate who typically populates that zone. They can also add short descriptive tags that others can upvote or downvote. Nifty! (il)
3. Musical Mix Crafted By Humans
It may still be difficult to travel back in time, but fortunately, we can do so online. What if you wanted to listen to the pop charts extravaganza from the US back in 1955 or Uzbekistan in 1932? Well, Radiooooo has got your back (well, you might need to sign up for a free basic plan first).
The website is a collection of songs collected over decades and now searchable, with filters by genre, speed, country, and time period. In fact, you can search by slow for chilling, fast for dancing, and weird music for bugging out — indeed, there is something for everyone! And if you want to go fancy, there is a shuffle mode, with songs picked by the curators. (vf)
4. Dimensions Of Everyday Objects
Putting things in perspective can be quite difficult. You might want to design a specific illustration, but you need to get the dimensions right and consider standard measurements and sizes for objects to look realistic.
Dimensions is the place to go: it’s an ongoing reference database to help designers better communicate standard measurements and sizes of everyday objects. It contains plenty of references for everything from animals and transport to pop culture, furniture, and plants. Neat little helper! (vf)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
As always, 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.
- Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christina Vallaure. July 23–29 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Aug 20–29 - Jump to all workshops →
We are also getting ready for our new SmashingConf 2025 adventures this year and the next — with practical insights all around accessibility, UX, design systems, CSS, and front-end:
- Freiburg 2025 🇩🇪 (Sep 8–11), on design systems, complex UIs, refactoring and performance,
- New York 2025 🇺🇸 (Oct 6–9), on UX, design, dashboards, accessibility, CSS, design systems,
- Amsterdam 2026 🇧🇪 (Apr 13–16), UX, design, Figma, CSS, accessibility, and product design.
- In-person Workshops in Antwerp and Madrid 🇧🇪 🇪🇸 (Sep–Nov 2025), on Figma and Complex UIs.
6. Washing Away Background Images
What interface do you imagine for a tool that simply removes backgrounds from an image? Probably a drag-and-drop UI, with a few simple buttons to upload the image and download the new image. Well, BgRemove is different.
The tool invites you to throw your image into a washing machine, and then clean it, with a few lovely sound effects and an audio track, kindly provided by a Japanese laundry service. Quite unnecessary, of course, but lovely to visit — with a bit of character and personality as well. (vf)
7. Mythical Stories
If you are looking for mystical stories and mythological tales, MythCloud could be just a goldmine to explore. It’s a growing online repository with around 200 digital sources and artifacts — broken down by categories, from visual arts and oral history to folklore, crafts, games, and costumes.
A fantastic resource with resources to be inspired by and stumble upon — unexpected little discoveries from around the world, and always complemented with useful resources, readings, podcasts, and videos. An open education resource developed as part of the Erasmus+ project Digital Mythologies. And: you can also ask for specific insights via MythCloud’s AI as well. (vf)
8. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚
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. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”
“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print shipping in August, eBook available for download later this summer. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.
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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