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Thank you for your feedback, I understand what you are saying. If you compare Smashing Magazine's article from a year ago with the recently published ones, you'

Thank you for your feedback, I understand what you are saying. If you compare Smashing Magazine's article from a year ago with the recently published ones, you'll notice a big difference. We haven't been publishing "N beautiful pictures of Y" articles for almost a year now. We are trying to make SmashingMag a high quality publication for designers and developers. You won't find photography posts on Smash any longer (only maybe once every 3 months or so, over the weekend, but they are not our focus). Please do check Smashing Magazine and its recent articles. We have changed a lot, and we are aware that this is probably a long process, and we are willing to get better and become more useful and relevant for the design community. Comments such as yours help us find the right direction and stick to it. For instance, we created an experts panel where we invited experts of various fields to review articles published on Smashing Magazine before they get published. Every expert gets paid for his/her review. We would love to have you as a reviewer in our expert panel, to improve and maintain the high quality of the articles. Are you interested? Or maybe you or some other readers of Hacker News would like to write a rebuttal, explaining what's wrong in the article and what the real "proper" rules are? We would love to publish it on Smashing Magazine. We really want to help out the community. It was never about just pumping some (good, bad or average) content out there, it never was. We want to publish high quality articles, and only high quality. I like the idea of having a series of articles on one particular aspect of design, and we've had such series in the past, and they usually work well. So I will definitely keep that in mind. Thank you, matrix, I truly appreciate your time and your feedback. — Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine

Silhouette 16y ago
> Or maybe you or some other readers of Hacker News would like to write a rebuttal, explaining what's wrong in the article and what the real "proper" rules are? We would love to publish it on Smashing Magazine. In that case, just as a friendly note, you might like to consider whether your "How to become a Smashing Magazine Author" page really says what you mean to say. For example, it starts with: "Who can become a Smashing author? You. However, you need to have experience as a blogger or an author." and it asks explicitly for URLs to existing articles/examples. Personally, I have an interest in many subjects you cover (and do some of them for a living for various companies) and I participate in various on-line forums under my real name so I suppose you could see my writing there. However, I don't run my own design blog or publish books on the subject. I would imagine the same is true of many other people reading this discussion on HN. Your post here suggests that you would like to hear from those people if they were interested in writing for you and had relevant experience to share; your guidelines on your web site suggest otherwise.
chime 16y ago
> We haven't been publishing "N beautiful pictures of Y" articles for almost a year now. We are trying to make SmashingMag a high quality publication for designers and developers Thank you for that. I think you have done a great job overall going in this direction. I loved http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-of-the-world/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typ... posted earlier this year. I understand it's impossible to make every single article aim for perfection but now that you have raised the bar for yourself and we know about it, you have no choice but to meet it every single time. The first thought in my mind when reading the current article was how the color difference between left and right slides affected my perceptions and hence completely negated the subsequent analysis. For a second I actually thought it would be funny if I made a parody article and switched the left and right slides and justified it with copy-pasted text from your own article. I love typography and I try to learn more about it any time I get. But unfortunately, despite reading the entire article, I left away feeling like I learnt nothing. It's hard to say exactly why but just compare the current article with The Beauty Of Typography and you'll see what I'm trying to say here.
- smashing_mag 16y ago
  Thank you, I truly appreciate your feedback. The truth is that reader's expectations are permanently increasing and sometimes it is really difficult to meet these expectations because every reader has different expectations and requirements for our articles. You can't please everybody, and we can just try to make sure that the vast majority of readers finds a piece useful and/or interesting. We try to do our best to keep the high quality level, and the amount of editing work for every single article hopefully speaks to that. I understand what you are saying regarding the color difference in the examples, and it would be more correct to keep the background color the same, but I truly do not think that it would change the choice of typefaces a lot. We have carefully considered the typefaces and how they work together regardless the background they are on. Also, I found quite many useful practical tips in the article, which is why it was published in the first place. But I can see that some descriptions are more general and could (and should) be more precise and concise. I will certainly keep your remark in mind for the next articles.

Silhouette 16y ago

> Or maybe you or some other readers of Hacker News would like to write a rebuttal, explaining what's wrong in the article and what the real "proper" rules are? We would love to publish it on Smashing Magazine. In that case, just as a friendly note, you might like to consider whether your "How to become a Smashing Magazine Author" page really says what you mean to say. For example, it starts with: "Who can become a Smashing author? You. However, you need to have experience as a blogger or an author." and it asks explicitly for URLs to existing articles/examples. Personally, I have an interest in many subjects you cover (and do some of them for a living for various companies) and I participate in various on-line forums under my real name so I suppose you could see my writing there. However, I don't run my own design blog or publish books on the subject. I would imagine the same is true of many other people reading this discussion on HN. Your post here suggests that you would like to hear from those people if they were interested in writing for you and had relevant experience to share; your guidelines on your web site suggest otherwise.

chime 16y ago

> We haven't been publishing "N beautiful pictures of Y" articles for almost a year now. We are trying to make SmashingMag a high quality publication for designers and developers Thank you for that. I think you have done a great job overall going in this direction. I loved http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-of-the-world/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typ... posted earlier this year. I understand it's impossible to make every single article aim for perfection but now that you have raised the bar for yourself and we know about it, you have no choice but to meet it every single time. The first thought in my mind when reading the current article was how the color difference between left and right slides affected my perceptions and hence completely negated the subsequent analysis. For a second I actually thought it would be funny if I made a parody article and switched the left and right slides and justified it with copy-pasted text from your own article. I love typography and I try to learn more about it any time I get. But unfortunately, despite reading the entire article, I left away feeling like I learnt nothing. It's hard to say exactly why but just compare the current article with The Beauty Of Typography and you'll see what I'm trying to say here.

smashing_mag 16y ago
Thank you, I truly appreciate your feedback. The truth is that reader's expectations are permanently increasing and sometimes it is really difficult to meet these expectations because every reader has different expectations and requirements for our articles. You can't please everybody, and we can just try to make sure that the vast majority of readers finds a piece useful and/or interesting. We try to do our best to keep the high quality level, and the amount of editing work for every single article hopefully speaks to that. I understand what you are saying regarding the color difference in the examples, and it would be more correct to keep the background color the same, but I truly do not think that it would change the choice of typefaces a lot. We have carefully considered the typefaces and how they work together regardless the background they are on. Also, I found quite many useful practical tips in the article, which is why it was published in the first place. But I can see that some descriptions are more general and could (and should) be more precise and concise. I will certainly keep your remark in mind for the next articles.