December 23, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #539
This newsletter issue was sent out to 180,551 subscribers on Tuesday, December 23, 2025.
Editorial
Oh my, you’ve opened this email on Christmas Eve — thank you so much for that. More than that, thank you so much for reading this very newsletter in 2025, and perhaps even in previous years.
To many of us, it was a year full of challenges and hardships, but also hard and passionate work. As we enter 2026, I sincerely wish you a truly wonderful, positive time with your friends and loved ones — and a year full of positive surprises, good vibes, and great positive energy! 🧡
In this issue, we highlight a few useful resources for product designers — all around Figma, product design, stakeholder engagement, storytelling, and design strategy. As with every newsletter, we hope you’ll find this one useful, too.
And if you’d like to dive deeper, we have friendly online workshops and conferences scheduled next year. We sincerely hope to see you online and in-person next year. Happy holidays, everyone!
— Yours truly, Vitaly
1. The Elements Of Product Design
Different types of design decisions, whether they are aesthetic, structural, conceptual, or strategic, require different approaches and skills. To help you ensure your team has the necessary skills to give your project a solid foundation, Jamie Mill created The Elements of Product Design, a diagram that explains product design as a stack of decisions built on top of a stack of knowledge, rather than as a process.
2. The Form Factor Trap
Design is often reduced to the final output, particularly by stakeholders. However, as Pavel Samsonov argues, the value of design isn’t in producing visual artifacts, but in the process that leverages them. In his article “Design Without Process, or The Form Factor Trap,” he explores why the design process is crucial for building a good product and what’s at risk when you take shortcuts.
3. How To Stop The Stakeholder Swirl
It’s frustrating when design reviews turn into endless cycles of feedback without clear decisions. Parvaneh Toghiani, Principal Designer at Uber, shares the framework she has developed over the years to make reviews more systematic, productive, and enjoyable. Precious tips for embracing reviews as opportunities for alignment and growth instead of seeing them merely as a path to approval.
Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
As you probably know, we run online workshops on frontend and UX, 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.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Behavioral Design Workshop UX
with Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk. Jan 15– 29 - Deep Dive On Accessibility Testing Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Jan 19 – Feb 2 - Building With AI For Everyone Free
with Christine Vallaure. Jan 20 - Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jan 22 – Feb 26 - Designing For Complex UI Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Mar 3–17 - The UX Bundle Package (3× Video Courses) UX
with Vitaly Friedman. - Jump to all workshops →
4. Accessibility Guidelines Card Deck
A fantastic resource for running accessibility workshops, audits, and training comes from Johannes Lehner. Together with a group of passionate contributors, he created the WCAG 2.2 Card Deck. Available as a Figma file and GitHub repo, it summarizes WCAG 2.2 guidelines, with a print-ready PDF version with print margins, Braille version, and translations in several languages.
5. Building Smarter Figma Components
Everybody loves to work with a lean and refined Figma library, but when it has been in use for some years, there’s often quite some bulk that has added up and made it slow and, well, annoying. Jérôme Benoit shares insights into how the Doctolib team tackled the task of cleaning up their design system, along with practical tips for building smarter Figma components.
6. Principles Of Better Stories
How can we tell stories that matter, delight, offer value, and maybe even change the world? To help us communicate more effectively, Jeremy Connell-Waite, Communications Designer at IBM, condensed everything he learned about storytelling over the last twenty years into a set of nine principles, with video tutorials, scientific research, cheat sheets, inspirational keynotes, and reading lists.
7. The Little Book Of Strategy
No matter how experienced you are, it is normal to get stuck on your strategy and leadership journey every now and then. For those occasions, Peter Bihr wrote The Little Book Of Strategy. Drawing on his experience from seeing the pitfalls and mistakes that leaders encounter in their day-to-day, he shares actionable advice to help you get past those moments.
8. Design Prompt-Building Interfaces
A lot of AI products don’t have UI controls such as sliders, filters, sorting, or radio buttons that help people express more precisely what they want. To provide some more guidance, Sen Lin put together an overview of design patterns and examples for helping users articulate their intents strategically.
For more examples of designing effective prompt-building interfaces, also be sure to check out Vitaly’s LinkedIn post.
Accessible UX Research, eBook Now Available For Download 📚
We’ve got exciting news! eBook versions of Accessible UX Research, a new Smashing Book by Michele A. Williams, are now available for download! Which means soon the book will go to the printer. Order the eBook for instant download now or reserve your print copy at the presale price.
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. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the eBook right away.
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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