Vitaly Friedman—in:focus 02

Above: Photo by Marc Thiele

In this, the second instalment of in:focus, I’m very pleased to introduce Vitaly Friedman. Editor of the award winning Smashing Magazine and non-stop Tweeter to nigh-on the entire web design world, Vitaly has taken some time out to answer a few questions.

So, Vitaly, is there anyone that doesn’t follow you on Twitter?! I noticed you tweeted recently about the importance of (or lack of) actual numbers as a value of a Twitter account’s worth. Can you expand on this?

Well, there are plenty of people who don’t follow @smashingmag on Twitter. Because we are trying to cover the various areas of Web design, our tweets relate to many areas of design and Web development. We hope to deliver useful pointers to everybody who is involved in creating websites one way or another, but for some users we tweet way too often, creating noise in their stream which is why they unfollow us. And it’s perfectly fine, I probably would do the same if I was in their position.

I don’t think that the number of followers says much about the influence of a certain user. Actually, it’s the number of active followers who engage in conversations that matters. The value of a Twitter account is reflected by the quality of conversations propagated through the account. I am proud that we have many discussions going on and our followers participate in them, however, it’s probably at most 20–30k active contributors. The rest are rather passive and consume the content only.

When you registered smashingmagazine.com did you have any idea just how big the site would become?

No, we had no idea at all. Smashing Magazine was an experiment; we just decided to publish a couple of articles and see how it went. The rest was the result of a persistent, hard work with some luck involved.

A couple of years ago Smashing Magazine got criticised somewhat because of its content. However you are, in my opinion, a shining example of someone listening to users’ needs and not taking things personally. Is this something that came naturally to you, or did you have to put your own feelings on hold for the sake of keeping your readers happy?

Indeed, we’ve been heavily criticized for the lack of original content and publishing lists and round-ups back in 2008–09. The feedback from the community was very strong and very constructive. We’ve quickly understood that we need to further improve our editorial work to meet the needs and expectations of our readers. In fact, it was a very important period in the young Smashing Magazine’s history. We’ve worked very hard to make our publication more professional, optimize the processes involved and improve the overall quality of the magazine. I must admit that I am very proud of the result we have now. Most changes are related to the work that takes place behind the curtains, but actually many things have changed over the last year. Smashing Magazine is mature now.

Personally, I never take things personally; as long as the feedback is valuable, I am always glad to receive it. However, it doesn’t mean that things are then adjusted right away. Sometimes it’s just as important to not listen to what some users say because you have your own vision of things and you believe in it. This is how I try to approach my professional decisions.

With such a huge readership, it’s hardly possible to make all readers happy. It’s our job to make sure that all published articles pass our quality and editorial guidelines and that they are valuable to our readers. Ultimately, it’s up to you guys to decide how well we are doing our work. We never compromise and we never do favours. Sometimes it’s difficult, but this is what we believe is essential for a high-quality publication that we are striving for.

Would you agree that listening to Smashing Magazine’s readers and responding to their needs has been a major factor in its success?

Well, it’s a difficult question. I wouldn’t say so. It is important to have your own vision of your work and your personal goals. Being close to readers is important, but it doesn’t mean that you should blindly follow every idea suggested to you. I think it is important to recognize user’s needs and address them, yet it’s even more important to realize how the interests of our readers evolved over time and what isn’t important any longer.

You recently won .net magazine’s Blog of the Year award—how did this make you feel, was it unexpected?

.net Magazine logo

It was great to feel that the design community recognizes and respects our efforts. It really was. However, I am not a big fan of awards; I think they are often overrated and aren’t very helpful. It might have been great for my personal ego, but I don’t like looking at the awards that we’ve received. It isn’t helpful nor productive. It only distracts from the actual work. I prefer to have design books around me instead.

What is your personal background? Were you a designer, a developer? What did you do before Smashing Mag?

I was born in Minsk, Republic of Belarus. When I finished school, I moved with my parents to Germany where I studied computer science and maths. It was the time when I discovered my passion for typography, writing and design. I vividly remember spending days and nights with learning this weird new thing they called “Web design”. It was a remarkable time in my life. Honestly, I don’t remember any other time when I was so passionately involved in learning something new. Then I started working as a freelancing designer and developer. And after 6 years I co-founded Smashing Magazine.

What is a typical day for you?

A desk at the Smashing offices

Above: The desk of Smashing intern, Jessica Bordeau

Well, there is no such thing, actually. I like keeping things organized yet I love creative chaos as well. Sometimes an idea pops up in my mind and I start working on it right away. I’ve had nights when I would get up every 20 minutes to sketch something or just add some notes in my notebook. I love writing; especially when it’s too early in the morning or too late in the night—the best time when there are no distractions and you can best focus on the work. However, evenings are always reserved for my family and my beautiful girlfriend Sveta. That’s the time when I never work.

You seem to tweet nonstop. Do you have a particular tool that queues tweets to be published throughout the night?

Yes, we have developed a system of collecting, preparing and publishing tweets. All resources are approved manually by me, so we also have a strict quality control here. Actually, we do not tweet at nights, but we do have a mechanism to schedule tweets in place.

So everyone reads your blog, but which blogs do you enjoy regularly reading?

Well, not everybody reads Smashing Magazine. But I love reading Drawar, CSS Tricks, UX Booth, Design Shack, GetFinch, and recently Method & Craft, 52 Weeks of UX, WhatMakesThemClick.net and Idsgn.org.

You employ external reviewers (the Experts Panel) to audit the quality of the content on Smashing Magazine. I was recently fortunate enough to join the Experts Panel, but how long has it been in place? Is it a vital step in the publishing process? Could you ever go back to not having it in place?

The Experts Panel has been in place for over a year now. It was a necessary step of ensuring that our publication is becoming more professional and reliable. We have the responsibility to deliver reliable information, and so it’s our duty to make sure that we don’t spread bad practices. There are certain topics that I just don’t know well enough; this is where reviews from professionals are incredibly helpful. Besides, it’s always very useful to get a different perspective on the article. More often than not there are little things or details that the author and the editor might have missed or forgotten.

The Experts Panel is a remarkable instrument for ensuring the quality of articles published on Smashing Magazine. Every article is always reviewed by at least two independent experts of the industry before it gets published. Of course, all reviewers also get paid for their work and time. I can’t imagine working without the Experts Panel today.

How big is the full-time Smashing Magazine team?

Our editorial team is just me and my colleague Iris. Besides, we have a front-end developer, a system administrator and a marketing manager. My colleague Sven Lennartz is taking care of the finances; and we also have a small advertising team in place. We also have people who work part-time and help us with the office, finding useful resources, preparing posts etc. That’s all, actually.

The Smashing books are great, was printed publishing a natural move for you? Have you got more plans for print?

We wanted to explore something new and so we thought that we could try publishing a book on our own. There was no investor involved, no publisher, we did it all by ourselves. It was a very remarkable and rewarding experience: personally, I’ve learned a lot about the printing and publishing process; and I am confident that this knowledge will turn out to be very valuable in our ongoing and future projects.

With the first book we have experienced some production and logistics errors, but we’ve learned a lot since then. The second book is the book that the first one should have become. I am very proud of the work we’ve done with it and we proved to ourselves and to our readers that we can do it properly. Actually, you can find the details about the publishing process of the book in the last chapter of the Smashing Book 2.

What do you think makes a good blog post? What traits do most quality articles share?

A good blog post should be valuable and well-prepared. You need to take care of all the little details such as the quality of the images, the flow of the article, its structure, image caption… It just has to be perfect. As I’ve written in my recent article Dear Web Design Community, Where Have You Gone?

“As content creators, we often depend on advertising, and that’s sometimes the necessary evil that we need to accept to be able to monetize our dedicated writing efforts. And there is nothing wrong about it. However, we need to set clear limits to how the advertising can and how it cannot be presented on our websites. For example, text link advertising and sponsored posts should always be clearly marked as such. We should have a strict separation between content and advertising. Each of us could design a set of personal principles for his or her websites (publishing policy), publish these rules online and stick to them no matter what. This way the readers will respect you and appreciate the simple fact that you are strongly committed to quality work.

“We could benefit from being more critical about our content and the way we present it online. It means paying more attention to copy, consistency of our writing style, quality of images and image captions, design of code snippets etc. These details give our writing a different tone; they empower our thoughts and make the content more trustworthy and reliable. Why don’t we make our work more challenging by trying to make every article we publish at least a tiny bit better than the previous one? We could try not to just “put stuff out there”, but curate our delicate ramblings, making sure that every published article has the highest level of quality that we can afford for it. A style guide can be helpful in this case, especially for larger websites.”

That’s what each of us should be aiming for. That’s what makes a blog post good.

What do you think sets Smashing Magazine apart from the million-and-one other web design blogs out there?

It’s a very interesting question. I think that our commitment to professional, high quality work, to comprehensive, valuable articles is what makes us different. Consistency and integrity of our work is very important to us. As I mentioned above, we never compromise and we respect our Publishing Policy and we would never violate it. We are protecting the interests of our readers no matter what. For instance, we would never publish a sponsored post; we would never trick our users in some way, we respect and appreciate the time and efforts our readers dedicate to our publication. I hope that that’s what makes us different.

Are there certain types of article you prefer over others? Example-based code articles versus opinion pieces, for example.

No, not really. What’s really important to me is that the article has substance. It needs to leave something behind; our readers should have learned something useful after reading the article. But the article could as well be thought-provoking and raise discussions in the community.

What would you personally love to see more of on the web? You tweet a huge variety of resources and articles but what gets you excited?

Personally, I would love our community to be more involved.

I’ve raised many points in the article Dear Web Design Community, Where Have You Gone? but I’d love to see more people curating and supporting valuable resources. It has always been my personal goal to support those little tools and services that help designers and developers in their regular work. Such tools make our life a little bit easier, yet they too often do not get the attention they deserve and consequently such resources aren’t being further maintained and supported. And that’s too bad. This is why I always pay close attention to suggestions from our readers via Twitter or email. We are always happy to support meaningful and useful work, this is why the vast majority of our tweets link to external websites that aren’t related to Smashing Magazine in any way.

What’s the next step for Smashing Mag? Have you got anything exciting round the corner?

Well, we’ve got some plans for this year, but we don’t want to jeopardize the quality of our regular work, so we’ll take things slowly. Let’s wait and see. We’ll be 5 years old this September, so we might have something special coming up.

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