Hello Smashing Friends,
As we are nearing the holidays in between the years, we would love to use the chance to do just one simple thing: to send you some of our wholehearted, warmest greetings to you. We met some of you in person, but we haven’t met most of you just yet.
Perhaps it will change in 2025. And perhaps even more wonderful things will change next year. Let it be a calm, peaceful, optimistic, generous and beautiful year; a year full of memories and small and positive surprises. Full of clarity, hope, and enthusiasm.
Most importantly, let it be the happiest year for you with a lot of love, support, and kindness that surrounds you and that you spread to people around you.
On our hands, we’re happy to share some fun and useful gems to explore over the holidays. Nothing too serious, and nothing too work-related. But hopefully, something that might put a smile on your face.
Happy 2025, everyone! 🎉🥳
— Vitaly
1. Live Radio From Around The World
About 44,000 radio stations broadcast around the world today, connecting people and places — from the biggest megacities to the remotest corners of the planet. If you’re up for a musical journey through countries, languages, and music styles, Radio Garden makes exploring live radio from all around the world as easy as turning a globe.
Once you’re on the Radio Garden site, turn the globe to start your journey. Each radio station appears as a green dot — click it, and it will start playing immediately. You can also search for your favorite stations and places or explore current content and playlists.
Maybe you’ll land on an Arctic Outpost station that brings you shellac records from the first half of the 20th century, pick up on Afro-Creole dialects in Suriname, or experience some Filipino holiday vibes in English and Tagalog? Happy listening! (cm)
2. Fun Interactive Experiences
We all need a little bit of distraction sometimes, and especially when you’re stuck on a tough problem at work, it can work wonders to occupy your mind with something completely different for a moment. For occasions like these, be sure to keep the site Neal.fun nearby.
Neal Agarwal is a master of creating fascinating mini-games and interactive experiences that make you wonder, have fun, and that cater for lots of aha moments along the way. His collection on Neal.fun includes more than 30 of them.
Whether it’s scrolling your way to space to discover which aircraft and animal makes it to which altitude, launching an asteroid to learn more about its impact, solving absurd trolley problems, exploring weird and cool Street View finds, or attempting to draw a perfect circle — there sure is something in it for you. Enjoy! (cm)
3. Discover Movies Based On Your Mood
So, you’re looking forward to a cozy movie night at home, but you still need some inspiration on what to watch? Instead of endlessly scrolling through your favorite streaming platform to find something that sparks your interest, how about a movie that matches your current mood? Mood2Movie is here to help.
Just select one of 18 feelings on the Mood2Movie site, and it will recommend you a movie based on it. You’re feeling cheerful? Then “Rio” could be for you. Reflective? How about “The Social Dilemma”? Each recommendation comes with a trailer and a short description of the plot. If you’re not happy with the result, you can skip it to get a new recommendation. (cm)
From our friends
Open Web Docs is a community of web developers, standards makers, and technology companies that considers web platform documentation to be critical digital infrastructure. To ensure its long-term health, we work together on creating and maintaining documentation and compatibility data on MDN Web Docs, caniuse.com, Baseline, and other projects. Sponsor OWD on GitHub to support our work!
4. Visual History Of The Latin Alphabet
It is often suggested that the Latin alphabet evolved in a linear way, from the Roman Capitalis to Antiqua scripts to today’s Grotesk. However, this is only one possible view among many, and the history of type and script is, at its core, a network, as the ARETE project beautifully shows.
Created by experts at the UCLAB at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, ARETE visualizes the historical developments and formal relationships of the different scripts and typefaces of the Latin alphabet over the centuries — from Archaic Latin to modern handwriting scripts of today. Lots of interesting insights are guaranteed for anyone with a sweet spot for typography. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! 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.
With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
6. Tools To Simplify Everyday Tasks
You provide the input, they provide the output as a result, that’s the idea behind IO Tools. IO Tools is an extensive suite of useful web apps for designers, developers, authors, marketers, analysts, and even gamers.
Whether you’re looking for an empty lines remover, a space to tab converter, a text compare tool, or a name generator, with more than 300 tools available, chances are good that IO Tools has just what you need. You can use the tools for free; however, some of them, like AI tools, consume credits (you get 50 free credits daily). One for the bookmarks. (cm)
7. New Video Course: How To Measure UX And Design Impact
Ready to dive deeper? Well, we have something very special coming up for you: Our brand-new video course “How To Measure UX & Design Impact” with Vitaly Friedman. Meet a 8-hour long journey to UX metrics and design KPIs, sailing in unchartered waters every now and again.
From establishing team-specific design KPIs to translating ambiguous objectives into practical design goals and making sense of OKRs, SUS, UMUX-Lite, TPI, KPI trees, feedback scoring, gap analysis, and Kano model, the course is filled with plenty of examples to help you measure UX. Jump to details.
8. Free Branded Video Call Backgrounds
You need to hop on a quick video call with a client but you don’t want them to see the buzzing office in the background or your tiny home office? Instead of reverting to one of the standard virtual backgrounds that Zoom, Meets, or Teams have to offer, you might want to give Free Office Backgrounds a try.
Created by the team at Design Huddle, Free Office Backgrounds generates a branded virtual background for your video calls. You can upload a logo or an image, and will get a selection of background images as a result: industrial loft offices, friendly meeting rooms with warm wood and plants, big windows, nice furniture — different styles that all create a professional atmosphere, with your logo or image adorning the room as the centerpiece. (cm)
9. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
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. Have you checked them out already?
Meet our newest book: Success At Scale by Addy Osmani. Get the book or browse the complete library.
10. Recent Smashing Articles
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 Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf) and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
Sent to truly smashing readers via Mailchimp.
We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.
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