Hello Smashing Friends,
The Web is full of beautiful hidden gems. It has become an incredibly noisy and busy place, but people still experiment, play, bring useful little helpers together and release lovely little tools for everyone to use and benefit from.
This newsletter issue is dedicated to just that — little hidden gems, kindly shared by people who are curious, who are passionate and who are happy to share what they've learned with everyone to benefit from.
That's also the spirit of our upcoming SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026 🇳🇱, our shiny new event for designers and UI engineers, with focus on design systems, accessibility, AI, designing for complex products and front-end. Jump to details →
Meet the speakers at SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026. See you there!
And we also have a few online workshops coming up:
And now let's dive into the magical world of hidden gems on the web!
— Vitaly
1. Searching For Birds
Do you have a soft spot for birds? Nadieh Bremer created a wonderful project that not only captures the hearts of bird lovers but also leaves everyone interested in data visualization, illustration, or storytelling awe-inspired. "Searching for Birds" is an interactive, dataviz-driven story that connects humans with birds by exploring how we search for them.
2. Public Work Search Engine
Featuring more than 100,000 public domain works such as scans, prints, and images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources, Cosmos' Public Work search engine is a treasure chest for anyone looking for historical artifacts. The artifacts are grouped by similarity and topic, perfect for researching themes, various points of view, and detailed drawings of objects, people, and nature.
3. New Ways Of Working Playbook
How can we create a workplace where everyone on the team thrives? Mark Eddleston's New Ways Of Working Playbook helps teams explore and experiment with collaboration patterns found in progressive organizations. It covers everything from meetings and feedback to decision-making and conflict engagement.
From our sponsor
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Meet Silk — a free, lightweight design system built to make your life easier. Battle-tested in real production environments, Silk comes with ready-made foundations, high-quality components, and clear structure and guidelines. Don't waste your team's time — tackle UI inconsistencies faster. Explore the free UI kit in Figma 👉
4. AI Interaction Atlas
What do you need to consider to design a human-centered AI system? "The Atlas of AI Interaction Design" explores more than 100 interaction patterns for designing human-AI interactions. By equipping teams with a shared vocabulary for mapping roles, responsibilities, and decision points in AI systems, it helps identify gaps and responsibilities when designing complex, multi-step AI experiences.
5. Accessibility For Everyone
Accessibility seems daunting? It doesn't have to be. To help you navigate the accessibility landscape, Laura Kalbag offers her book Accessibility For Everyone for free reading. From understanding impairment challenges to learning how to plan for, evaluate, and test accessible design, it helps you build a solid set of accessibility best practices.
6. Design System Tactics
No matter where on your design system journey you might be, Design System Tactics helps you tackle all those big and small challenges you might encounter. Created by Ness Grixti, the site guides you through the complete design system process, from getting alignment and setting up a system to scaling up, improving adoption, and working with AI.
From our sponsor
Axe-con is the world's largest digital accessibility conference, with breakout tracks dedicated to Accessibility in Development and Accessibility in Design. There's one more week left to register — join in and access the 45+ session recordings.
7. Design Token Naming Guide
Design system tokens are the building blocks of a design language, helping you make your design consistent and easy to scale. But how to name your tokens properly? The Design Token Naming Guide summarized everything you need to know to master naming conventions in six short, interactive lessons. And once you're familiar with the theory, you can use the naming tool to build your design token system right away.
8. 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:
9. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚
We've got exciting news! Printed copies of Accessible UX Research, a new Smashing book by Michele A. Williams, are now shipping. Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.
Meet our brand-new book: "Accessible UX Research" by Michele A. Williams. Printed copies shipping now.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.
10. Person Of The Week: Marie van Driessche
Please give a warm round of applause for our Person of the Week: Marie van Driessche. Marie is a Deaf accessibility expert and Accessibility Officer at UWV, the Dutch Employee Insurance Agency.
With over a decade of experience in UX research and design across sectors including finance, public broadcasting, and digital agencies, Marie specializes in inclusive design that goes beyond compliance. She is also an internationally established speaker on web accessibility and inclusive UX and mentors graduation students at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Marie! 🧡
11. 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, Vitaly Friedman, and Iris Lješnjanin.
Sent to truly smashing readers via Mailchimp.
We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.
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