Smashing Magazine UX Teardown: Putting the Byline Before the Headline

The first thing Smashing Magazine's article index tells you is a number: 2274 ARTICLES. The UX Design category says 57. The books page says 15 printed books. All three indexes in this flow state their own size before showing you anything.

That's a scope signal. A count tells you whether you're about to skim a shelf or a library, and it sets the expectation that you will not finish — which is presumably why a feed-shaped competitor like Medium's tag pages don't print one, and why infinite scroll works better when you can't see the bottom.

The second thing the index does is stranger. Its entries open with a face and a name in red — "Andy Budd wrote" — above a headline that hasn't been introduced yet. On Medium or Substack's discovery surfaces the author sits under the headline in small grey type, after the thumbnail. Here the byline is the lede.

This teardown walks the read flow — index, category, catalogue — to name that pattern and find the place it breaks.

Two chips that look identical and mean opposite things

The two rows of pills are the same shape and mean opposite things. The pink ones in the sticky header (Accessibility, UX, CSS, JavaScript, Performance) are the standing category system: permanent, complete, repeated on every page. The green ones beneath "Hidden gems" are an editor's shortlist.

Colour is doing all of the disambiguation. It mostly pays off, because the header row reads as navigation from being pinned and repeated, and the green row reads as editorial from the handwritten-sounding label above it. But that's a lot of meaning to hang on hue (NN/g on colour as the sole signal). A reader who processes both rows as one system will read the shortlist as a taxonomy, and conclude the site has no Design category. It has one. It's in the row above.

The right rail prints 10 min read and, underneath, 0 comments. Most publications swap a zero for "Join the discussion." Smashing prints the zero.

The category page tells the truth about its own tagging

Here is where the pattern breaks.

The UX Design category runs the same template one level down, adds an "Also related to" rail of sibling topics, and sorts reverse-chronologically like everything else. The newest article in it is dated July 12, 2023.

The site is not dormant. Its sibling category at /category/ux/ is full of current work — Designing For Distressed Users ran on July 9, 2026, and it is unambiguously an article about UX design. There is a "UX" chip in the header and a separate "UX Design" category page, and for three years the recent work has been landing on the first one. A reader who follows the second link gets a page that is technically accurate and practically false: it says nobody here has written about UX design since 2023.

That's the standing cost of a hand-maintained taxonomy, and it's invisible from the inside. Nobody broke anything. Someone picked a slightly different label a hundred times in a row, the page still renders, the query still returns rows, and a whole category quietly fell out of date (NN/g on category names that don't match user vocabulary).

An algorithmic feed would have hidden this. It would surface recent UX articles regardless of label and you'd never learn the taxonomy had drifted. Both systems have the flaw. Only the hand-kept one shows you the seam.

What I can't tell from outside is whether any of this costs Smashing anything — whether the UX Design page still gets traffic, whether the two categories were ever meant to be distinct, or whether someone there already knows and has it in a backlog. That's a question their analytics answers in an afternoon and a stranger reading the public site cannot answer at all.

The catalogue never changes voice

The books page is where reading turns into revenue, and the register barely shifts. "OUR CHARMING Printed Books." A mascot hauling a stack of hardcovers. The section label, 15 PRINTED BOOKS, set rotated in the left margin, the same print device the homepage uses for "COMMUNITY LINKS."

Print is the default tab and eBook is secondary, which is the reverse of what a digital publisher's economics would suggest. The books are called "our editorial flagships" and described in physical terms: cover art credited to an illustrator, hardcover, free worldwide shipping. Every single one repeats the same line beneath its price — save up to $10 and get the eBook free with Smashing Membership.

There's no modal, no exit-intent overlay. The membership ask is a line of copy under every price, plus a block in the middle of the homepage that names its exact size, 1,916 members, and prices itself against a cup of coffee.

The homepage makes the people visible

Scroll the whole thing and the thesis resolves. Story after story carries a photographed human in a tilted red frame. The sponsor sits in the right rail in its own grey box, clearly paid, never dressed as editorial. Deep in the page there's a Person of the Week: a named community member, a paragraph about what they do, and a thank-you addressed to them directly.

Nothing on this page is trending or ranked by popularity. The ordering signal is time and the recommendation signal is an editor, which in a category dominated by engagement-sorted feeds means Smashing spends its most valuable real estate putting faces on the page.

What this means for your product

Lead with whoever is accountable for the thing. Attribution is the cheapest layout decision on this list and the most expensive to maintain: a red byline above the headline commits you to a photographed portrait per author, a Person of the Week someone has to choose, and a comment count you've then agreed to print at zero. Smashing pays all three.

Tell people how big the thing is. A count behind a link costs one line and sets an expectation no amount of scrolling can. Hiding the number doesn't make a collection feel infinite. It makes it feel unmeasurable.

And the warning, which is the part most likely to apply to you: a taxonomy is only as current as the discipline of whoever applies the labels. If your filters are hand-maintained, something behind one of them is already years out of date and nobody has told you, because nothing errors — nothing 404s, nothing logs, and the count at the top stays accurate about a set that stopped growing. Go and look at the newest item behind each of your category links.

Take it further

The lens behind this teardown — can a user tell where they are, what's behind a link, and who's responsible for it — is the UX Clarity framework, the same one we apply in a Full UX Audit. For how that scoring turns into prioritized fixes, read what a real UX audit looks like.

Sources: NN/g — Category Names Suck · NN/g — Using Colour to Enhance Design · NN/g — Recognition vs Recall.

Ready to find out which of your category pages is quietly three years out of date? Apply for a Full UX Audit →