Big Bang Redesign: Smashing Magazine’s 2017 Relaunch, a Case Study
summary
Big bang rewrite moves Smashing off WordPress to a JAM Stack with a GitHub editorial workflow, built a CMS, comments, ecommerce, job board and a membership product over ~18 months; ad revenue collapses roughly to 1/18 of five years ago forcing the membership pivot. Front end runs on preact, uses CSS custom properties, a fluid-font formula to avoid media queries, BEM-like namespacing and all:initial. The relaunch ships and largely works, though maintenance and edge cases remain.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:10Smashing Magazine redesign
- 2:58Generic design needs personality
- 8:14Personality on a budget
- 11:28Brands with unique identities
- 16:51Rules for delightful UX
- 21:10Redesign without shapes
- 21:52Advertising crisis & membership
- 24:00Text-first design & microcopy
- 26:04Cat brand identity
- 27:50Tilting layout design
- 29:59Visual noise & perfectionism
- 31:04Front-end architecture
- 34:16No media queries
- 35:42Fluid layouts with math
- 41:00CSS organization & scoping
- 43:05Logic-first CSS
- 47:41Key lessons
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