Smashing Conference: Event Guide for Modern Web Professionals (Multiple Locations)

Smashing Confs are the foremost annual industry conferences focused on front-end and UX design. These are usually held four times in four different places but for 2023 they are scheduled in San Francisco, USA (May 23-26); Freiburg, Germany (Sept. 4-6); Antwerp, Belgium (Oct. 9-11); and online.

These conferences were started by Vitaly Friedman and Marc Thiele in 2012 and are some of the most highly anticipated events by web designers and developers. Smashing Confs are among the activities and output of Smashing Magazine, others of which include incisive articles, a library of web design eBooks and videos, and a bi-monthly email newsletter.

As a backgrounder, Smashing Magazine is an online publication founded in 2006 by Friedman, as editor-in-chief, and Sven Lennartz who served as CEO. It is part of the Smashing Media company based in Germany.

Through the years, Smashing Magazine has grown to be one of the biggest publishers of web design and development resources. It boasts hundreds of thousands of subscribers and counts some three million pageviews and two million unique visitors per month.

Each conference usually last two to three days and consists of single-track workshops and talks by leading industry experts. Discussions are focused on anything and everything that relates to web design including usability, UX, content strategy, best practices, and development tools, among many others.

As an overview of what awaits participants this year, the Smashing Confs in San Francisco, California this May will focus on cutting-edge front-end topics such as accessibility, web performance, and advanced CSS and JavaScript. There will be six “deep-dive” workshops and 12 speakers including Friedman and software engineers and experts.

The Smashing Confs in Germany this September will center on front-end, UX, and design and will delve into design systems, web performance, advanced techniques, and many more. There will be three workshops and 12 speakers among them project managers, design leaders, and web standards specialists.

Meanwhile, the conference in Belgium will be all about design and UX particularly product design, UI challenges, design systems, and usability. Activities include three workshops and presentations by a dozen speakers that include an award-winning designer and accomplished UX/UI designers.

Smashing Confs can accommodate 300 to 500 live attendees and, aside from hands-on workshops and discussion, feature challenges and hackathons as well as live coding and designing sessions. They are also excellent venues for jobs and hiring opportunities. For more details, visit https://smashingconf.com/conferences.