Luckily for many of us who are hungry for knowledge, Vitaly Friedman is a frequent speaker and lecturer. I had a great opportunity to sit down with him and ask the questions I have always wanted to.
As you probably know, Vitaly Friedman is the most public figure behind Smashing Magazine, the co-founder, and editor-in-chief. A writer, speaker, editor, and author.
However, after talking to him, I would describe him as a person who truly wants to help people be better at what they do. And he does that in various ways, through his writing, web design workshops and inspiring talks he gives at tech conferences around the world.
This is how, after all, Smashing Magazine started. Today, the magazine is a source of knowledge and inspiration.
This month, DaFED organisation, a nonprofit devoted to networking and organising educational events for the IT community, hosted a special edition of their monthly meetups in Novi Sad where Vitaly Friedman was a special guest. Before his talk “Dirty, little tricks from the dark corners of e-commerce”, Vitaly shared with me his thoughts about what makes the winning design and delightful e-commerce UX and what are the new challenges for design.
We talked about the most important skills in web design and looked into different design elements for website checkup, his first blog, his journey into web design industry how to design for users. I was very eager to hear about the process of obtaining the high-quality articles, and the success strategy of Smashing Magazine. The short answer is:
The quality speaks for itself.
When designing and in case you need a new website, Vitaly explains, start writing down the text of the interface. When you make the interface that’s funny, people might even ignore some of the issues it has (for example with incompatible fonts or typeface and design, so check out how to identify fonts) and will have an emotional connection to the interface without actually looking at the visual elements.
Often when we think about design, we tend to focus on the visual level, on the “skin”. But there is so much more going on, and there are so many connections that had to be made, and I think copywriting is one of the major ones.
Watch the interview, and find out the secrets of great design from one of the best designers and bloggers today.
As for his talk, he gave us a sneak pick into a new Smashing Magazine look.
Thank you, Vitaly!
As DaFED is devoted to strengthening community, designers and developers had an opportunity to get more tips and tricks from Vitaly about designing across different devices. He held a workshop about responsive design, “New Adventures in Responsive Web Design”.
DaFED’s journey started in 2012 when they organized the first meetup and lecture designed to ignite creativity and inspire conversation. Their main focus in on strengthening the community and promote knowledge sharing.
Eton Digital has been supporting the organization from the very beginning, and it’s our great pleasure to give back to the community in this way.
Take a look at the atmosphere from the workshop.
Enjoy the interview! 🙂
