SmashingConf New York 2017: Don’t Let Bad Front-End/UX Be Your Kryptonite!

About The Author

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬

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Don’t you feel like Wonderwoman or Superman when squishing that annoying CSS/JavaScript bug or improving front-end performance, or making the UX workflow smooth at your company? Well, we do! Now, we also love sharing. SmashingConf NYC 2017 won’t solve all complex problems, but once it’s over you’ll know how to conquer yours. With practical front-end and UX techniques, battles, fights, wins and losses, we’d love you to learn and share your special abilities and your experiences! So reserve that plane and meet us in New York City!

While designing for the web today, there are so many unknowns that getting things right appears to be a task that requires quite… special abilities. Don’t you feel like Wonderwoman or Superman when squishing that annoying CSS/JavaScript bug or improving front-end performance, or making the UX workflow smooth at your company? Well, we do! Now, we also love sharing, and as we know from Superman, “Do good to others, and everybody can be a Superman”! That should hold true for cats, too, right?

SmashingConf NYC 2017 won’t solve all complex problems, but once it’s over you’ll know how to conquer yours. With practical front-end and UX techniques, battles, fights, wins and losses, we’d love you to learn and share your special abilities and your experiences! So reserve that plane, that bird, or flying superhero and meet us in New York City! To the tickets.

About The Conference

When we organize a conference, we make sure that it provides a lot of value for everybody involved. We don’t care about volatile trends and we don’t believe in overnight success stories. Every success requires hard work and many failures along the way. There are lessons learned, takeaways, and problems solved, but also many sketches and designs and ideas and prototypes thrown away because they didn’t work. We’re interested in how problems are solved—ideas that failed, and why exactly they failed and what decisions were chosen instead.

Smashing Conference New York 2017

$549 $599

Get your ticket!

I feel my super powers increasing already!
Get 'em now: only 50 early-bird tickets available.

With SmashingConf New York 2017, we’ve set to challenge you to explore solutions that you’ve never considered before: master techniques, skills and all those fancy front-end superpowers and UX strategies. Can we achieve that? Well, try us!

Nothing obvious, nothing superficial. Just actionable insights that you can apply to your projects right away. From visual design to front-end performance, and from UX to eCommerce. Taking place on June 13th–14th, at New World Stages, in the very heart of New York’s Theater District.

First Confirmed Speakers

For this year’s cast, we’ve invited experts who have worked in small as well as large companies. People who spend day and night working and playing with web technologies. It doesn’t get more practical than that, does it? But with great power, comes great responsibility. Get ready to challenge these super speakers:

SmashingConf ny
  • Sara Soueidan\ Mastering SVG
  • Umar Hansa\ DevTools’ Workflow Google Chrome
  • Yuko Shimizu\ Meaningful Illustrations
  • Eric Reiss\ Selling Creative Design FatDux
  • Kate Dawkins\ Event Design
  • Joe Leech\ UX Psychology
  • Lyza D. Gardner\ Service Workers Bocoup
  • Brad Frost\ Atomic Design
  • Horace Dediu\ Future of Mobile Asymco.com
  • Nathan Curtis\ Design Systems EightShapes
  • Mystery Speaker\ (Someone you definitely know, and respect.)

Smashing Workshops

Our workshops offer the opportunity to come to grips with new ideas and techniques in real depth, with a full day spent on the topic of your choice. It’s a great way to round off your conference experience, and we provide lunch, too. By registering for a workshop while buying your conference ticket, you save $100 on the regular workshop ticket price.

Workshops On Monday, June 12th


  • Brad Frost
    Atomic Design by Brad Frost June 12th • This full-day masterclass takes a deep dive into the world of responsive web design, covering everything including broad concepts, strategy, how responsive design affects process, responsive design patterns and principles, and more. Read more…

  • Yuko Shimizu
    Good Ideas Make Great Illustration by Yuko Shimizu June 12th • Let’s work on a whole bunch of mini projects and exercises for a day to flex your brain and mind so you can start thinking and working like a real illustrator. Yuko is here to help! Read more…

  • Horace Dediu
    Persuasive Design by Horace Dediu June 12th • This full-day workshop will take you through the principles of persuasion using techniques of cinematography and visual storytelling. Whether one-on-one or in front of millions on TV, presentations are the primary means of persuasion in business. Read more…

  • Umar Hansa
    The Modern Front-End Workflow Bootcamp by Umar Hansa June 12th • In this workshop, Umar Hansa, a senior front-end web developer at Springer Nature, will share obscure practical workflow tips, tricks and techniques that will supercharge any developer’s workflow. Read more…

  • Vitaly Friedman
    Smart Responsive UX Design Patterns by Vitaly Friedman June 12th • In this brand new workshop, Vitaly Friedman (editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine), will cover practical techniques, clever tricks and useful strategies you need to be aware of when working on responsive websites. From responsive modules co clever navigation patterns and web form design techniques; the workshop will provide you with everything you need to know today to start designing better responsive experiences tomorrow. Read more…
  • Workshops on Thursday, June 15th


  • Eric Reiss
    An Introduction To Service Design by Eric Reiss June 15th • Service design combines key elements from user-experience design, interaction design, and quality management to create long-term value. In this full-day - workshop, you’ll discover the basic elements of each of these disciplines and how they work together to raise customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and enhance key events along the customer journey. Read more…

  • Joe Leech
    Psychology for Design and UX by Joe Leech June 15th • A practical way to understand how the human brain works and apply that knowledge to User Experience design. You know somethings are ‘good design’ and some things are ‘bad design’ for UX but have never been quite sure why this is so? Learn the psychological principles behind how our brain makes sense of the world and apply that to user interface design. Read more…

  • Sara Soueidan
    Mastering SVG by Sara Soueidan June 15th • Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are the new big thing in web design today, and for a good reason. SVG is going to be one of the fundamentals of web design, and getting a grip of it and how to use it is becoming more important as its usefulness becomes more obvious every day. Read more…

  • Smashing Conference New York Workshop
    Smart RWD Patterns by Vitaly Friedman June 15th • In this full-day workshop, Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, will present practical techniques, clever tricks and useful strategies you need to be aware of when working on any responsive design project. Most techniques are borrowed from mid-size and large-scale real-life projects, such as large e-commerce projects, online magazines and Web applications. Read more…
SmashingConf New York Workshop

$998 $1098

To the tickets →

Buy conference + workshops tickets and save $100.

Why This Conference Is For You

The Smashing experience is like walking in a little cozy place around the corner. You know everybody in person, and you have an authentic, intimate, personal experience. With lots of learning, sharing and networking along the way. Well, it won’t be the ultimate event of your life-time, but for front-end and UX, it will inspire you and push your boundaries significantly.

You’ll learn:

  1. Strategies for building fast responsive websites,
  2. Clever techniques for better front-end,
  3. Strategy to break out of the generic layouts,
  4. Approaches for better visual/brand identity design,
  5. Guidelines for building pattern libraries,
  6. How to build accessible and future-proof UIs,
  7. Mistakes and lessons learned from large projects,
  8. How to apply psychology in design decisions,
  9. How to improve conversion rates in eCommerce projects,
  10. How to tackle complexity when building a delightful, responsive user experience.

Ticket Sales And Pricing

Only 400 tickets are available, and we do everything possible to keep our prices fair and affordable. The price for two full conference days is $549 for early-bird tickets, and $599 for regular tickets. And again, if you book a workshop as well, you’ll save $100. Yay! Get your ticket right away.

SmashingConf NY: Convince Your Boss PDF
"8 reasons why you should send your incredibly hard-working, deserving employee to the SmashingConf" (PDF). Quite self-explanatory, really.

We also prepared a neat Convince Your Boss (PDF) (0.15 Mb) that you can use to convince your colleagues, friends, neighbors and total strangers to join you or send you to the event. We know that you will not be disappointed. Still not good enough? Well, tweet us @smashingconf — we can be quite convincing, too!

We Welcome Lovely Sponsors, You Know

We do everything possible to keep ticket prices affordable for everyone, and we welcome sponsors to help us create a truly unique, unforgettable conference experience. And you can be a major part of it.

We have quite a number of attractive and creative sponsorship packages for you, and we are also flexible and would love to adjust them to your needs. So if you’re interested, please email us at hello@smashingconf.com — we’d love for you to be involved!

See You In New York!

We are looking forward to seeing you in New York, and who knows, perhaps we can tackle more complex problems that we thought we would! See you there!

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)