The Shape of a Remote Conference Experience
SmashingConf Antwerp 2023 brought together a design and UX-focused lineup, and for those attending remotely, the experience extended well beyond the live stream. An online platform carried the talks, while a dedicated Slack channel gave remote attendees a space to connect. For sketchnoter Krisztina Szerovay, sharing key takeaways immediately after each session sparked small discussions that bridged the distance between the screen and the conference floor.
The result is a collection of visual notes capturing the substance of seven talks watched live, plus two more reviewed after the event. What follows distills each presentation into its core lessons.
Design Systems Beyond the Components
A recurring theme across the conference was the idea that design systems are more than shared UI kits. They are communication tools, governance structures, and living documents that require ongoing attention. Several speakers emphasized that the hardest part of a design system isn't building it — it's keeping it adopted and understood across teams.
One talk stressed the importance of documentation as a product in itself. If the people using your system can't find answers quickly, the system fails regardless of how polished the components are. Good documentation answers questions before they are asked, and it evolves alongside the code it describes.
Accessibility as a Creative Constraint
Accessibility came up not as a checklist but as a design material. Speakers showed how constraints around color contrast, focus management, and screen reader support force clearer thinking about hierarchy and interaction. When you remove reliance on color alone to convey state, you often end up with a stronger visual system overall.
Practical advice included testing with real assistive technology rather than only running automated audits, designing visible focus states that match the brand's aesthetic, and treating keyboard navigation as a first-class citizen from the start of a project.
The Psychological Side of UI
Several talks dug into how users perceive and process interfaces. Cognitive load, mental models, and the emotional response to different visual treatments all shape whether an interface feels intuitive or exhausting. One presenter illustrated how subtle motion and micro-interactions can communicate causality — what happened, what will happen, and what the user's action triggered.
Another theme was the danger of pattern blindness. Just because a pattern is common doesn't mean it's the right one for your content. Speakers urged the audience to question established conventions when the context demands something different.
Collaboration Between Design and Engineering
The handoff between designers and developers was another area of focus. Rather than throwing mockups over the wall, effective teams build shared vocabulary and shared tooling. One talk demonstrated how bringing engineering input into the design phase leads to better-informed decisions about feasibility, performance, and interaction details.
This mutual understanding extends to code reviews, where designers can participate, and design critiques, where engineers can weigh in on technical constraints. The result is ownership that spans the entire lifecycle of a feature.
The Future of Workflows
Some sessions looked at emerging tools and methodologies. The conversation wasn't just about AI-assisted workflows but about smaller, more focused tools that solve specific problems in the design-to-development pipeline. Speakers made the case for reducing complexity by choosing simple solutions that integrate well rather than monolithic platforms that promise everything.
The underlying message was consistent: craftsmanship still matters. No tool replaces the judgment of an experienced designer or engineer, but the right tools remove friction so that judgment can shine through.
What the Sketchnotes Capture
Each talk's visual summary distills the presentation into its memorable moments and practical tips. The following sections present the sketchnotes for:
- Three talks from Day 1 covering design system governance, interface psychology, and inclusive design.
- Four talks from Day 2 focused on developer-designer collaboration, productivity workflows, and front-end craft.
- Two additional talks watched on-demand after the live event.
Saving the Best for Last: Photos and Recordings
While the live experience had its own energy, recorded sessions remain available for those who missed a talk or want to revisit a particularly dense presentation. The lineup for SmashingConf Antwerp 2024 has also begun to take shape, with the first speakers and workshops already announced. Registration is open for those who want to secure an early-bird spot for the next edition.
Day One: Pattern-Setting Talks
Vitaly opened the conference with a few community rituals before the first speaker took the stage. He encouraged attendees to share both success and failure stories as learning tools, introduced the "Pac-man rule" for inclusive conversations — open a gap for someone who wants to join, just as Pac-man opens his mouth — and set up a mystery theme contest with a free ticket to the next conference as the prize. A design systems joke about Gray 500 and Button Primary going on a date to a naming convention set the tone for the opening talk.
Design System Traps and Pitfalls
Molly Hellmuth, a Figma design system specialist and instructor of the Design System Bootcamp course, presented the most common mistakes she sees students make repeatedly. These include:
- Adopting new features too quickly
- Adding too many color variables
- Using groups instead of frames
- Creating jumbo component sets
- Not prepping icons for the design system
She also shared several rapid design tips for working in Figma: setting the nudge amount to 8, hiding library components by prefixing names with a period or underscore, navigating to a specific layer by double-clicking on the layer icon, scoping variables (for example, making text-specific colors available only to text layers), and using auto layout stacking order beyond avatars — it works well for dropdown menus too.
How AI Ate My Website
Luke Wroblewski has produced content for 27 years: over 2,000 articles, plus videos, books and PDFs. He built a conversational interface that lets users ask questions of an AI trained on all of this material. The interaction pattern he designed is closer to a FAQ than a chatbot.
Wroblewski referenced recent Nielsen Norman Group usability research that identified an "apple-picking pattern" — users combining pieces from multiple answers, which generates friction. His interface avoids this by collapsing previous answers and showing only the current answer by default. The design also addresses the "what should I ask" problem with suggested questions appearing below each answer, keeping the flow uninterrupted. Citation links take users to the source directly, including to a specific point within a video, an approach he calls the "object experience."
Compared to general-purpose tools like ChatGPT, his implementation is more opinionated and specific, and users can dig deeper through the linked resources. The result is available at ask.lukew.com.
A Journey in Enterprise UX
Stéphanie Walter, who works in banking and fintech, shared insights on handling complexity in enterprise UX. Her approach begins with quantitative analysis — establishing the "what" and "how much" through content analysis and identifying duplicates. From there, she moves to understanding the "why" and "how" by getting access to internal users, conducting task-focused interviews, and documenting processes throughout. A key technique is asking users to "show me how you do this today," which counters the tendency to jump straight to solutions.
She distinguishes between two types of processes in enterprise work: a fast track for small features and UI tweaks that need little research, and dedicated research cycles for high-impact areas with significant uncertainty. The latter involves gathering prior research results, scheduling follow-up sessions, and iterating on design solutions with prototype usability testing, often using Axure. For testing, she recommends observational testing — asking users to perform their real tasks with the new tool rather than following a script — as well as user diaries and longer studies for behavior over time.
Walter corrected a common saying, noting that while "the user interface is like a joke," jokes sometimes require prior knowledge to land, and that doesn't make them bad — the same applies to interfaces that need domain context. She also warned that oversimplifying the UI can be a trap, and emphasized the importance of customization and providing all the data pieces users need. Her process runs through four phases: complexity, analysis, research, and solution design.
Designing a Product with a Point of View
Nick DiLallo focused on UX writing, beginning with a reminder to define the target audience before writing anything. Instead of designing for "anyone who cooks a lot," aiming for "expert home chefs" means not telling them to salt pasta water. A single strong sentence from that defined audience perspective can unlock the UI and its features.
He recommends choosing words with intent — "become a member" carries more meaning than "join" or "subscribe" — but warns against creative excess, such as replacing "add to cart" with safer, established phrasing. Writing should be designed rather than merely placed: content signals what the product cares about, and larger visual elements naturally command more attention. Voice can appear in unexpected places like the footer, but some contexts, including calendars and calculators, should stay free of brand personality.
The interface itself speaks, DiLallo noted, through the options it presents — including how a product asks for a user's gender. And actions matter more than words: promising a free trial and then requesting bank card details is like claiming to be vegetarian while eating a cheeseburger. He concluded by recommending that companies hire writers or content designers, since words are part of the user experience: "When writing and design work together, the results are remarkable."
The Invisible Power of UI Typography
Oliver Schöndorfer delivered his typography guidance with a live redesign of a banking app screen. His starting point: "The UI is the product, and a big part of it is the text." He asked how type can work for the product rather than against it.
His recommendations break down into three key areas:
- Font choice. System fonts feel boring; the selected typeface should reflect the product's voice. Good UI fonts are in the right category (typically sans, occasionally slab), have even strokes with low contrast to work at small sizes, use open letter shapes, and keep letterforms distinguishable — the "Il1" test.
- Hierarchy. Determine what matters most in each view, start from the body text, then emphasize and de-emphasize accordingly, always respecting accessibility constraints like minimum contrast ratios.
- Spacing. Make relationships between elements clear following the law of proximity, using a defined base unit.
After polish, and where appropriate a touch of delight, the result is, as Schöndorfer put it: "Go out there and pimp that type!"
Day Two: Responsive Design, Process Realities, and Ethics
Design Beyond Breakpoints
Christine Vallaure’s session focused on extending Figma’s capabilities for responsive design, particularly through container queries. Unlike media queries that respond to viewport size, container queries respond to the container itself. A component can alter its behavior based on its context — an icon button inside a card might lose its icon on resizing, for example. Nested queries are also possible.
Vallaure framed this work around the goal of better designer-developer communication. A German fairy tale about a race between a hedgehog and a rabbit served as her analogy: the rabbit (developer) is fast, while the hedgehog (designer) wins through cunning. Her point was not about imitation, but about embracing each other’s distinct tools and skills.
The practical applications go beyond static mockups. She emphasized using Figma to test how designs behave in different scenarios — where they should break and how — and for documentation. She recommended the EightShapes Specs plugin by Nathan Curtis for this purpose. Her advice included creating an interactive playground in Figma for designers and developers to experiment with components, and approaching developer discussions with foundational frontend knowledge rather than starting from zero.
It’s A Marathon, And A Sprint
Fabricio Teixeira, co-founder of UX Collective, structured his talk around running analogies and four case studies. For long-distance preparation, he noted that 80% of training should be easy runs with 20% devoted to intensive intervals. Product projects follow a similar pattern — things get hard, but the training matters. When asked how to avoid overconfidence, he suggested building an environment of trust so teammates can flag it.
The case studies showed that different projects demand different approaches. For Vistaprint’s face mask project, a 15-day sprint meant skipping detailed color and sizing selectors; the marathon phase only began after launch. Product requirements, in that case, were not required.
With Equinox’s treadmill UI, the team created a fake treadmill to prototype the experience while hardware manufacturing faced delays. They adjusted for hand reach zones and added spacing between UI elements for use while running. The challenge was taming the typical, cluttered treadmill dashboard where every element competes for attention. Timelines, Teixeira noted, aren’t straight lines.
The GoFundMe project treated research as a mindset rather than a process step. Design and research ran in parallel, informing each other continuously, and insights could come from anyone on the team regardless of role. A book club on social impact fed into a shared Figma knowledge hub.
The New York City Transit project required creating a real-time subway map, demanding significant vector work and math. The central question became how to clean up complexity.
Teixeira’s overarching point was to be “flexibly rigorous.” Like a runner listening to their body, teams should listen to their project’s context. There is no universal formula — sprints and marathons must be combined based on the work at hand, and teams should focus on principles like how they want to collaborate. He also suggested that a 1–3 hour kick-off is far too short for a six-month project, noting that his team introduced kick-off weeks.
Design Ethically: From Imperative To Action
Kat Zhou addressed the persistent challenge of oppressive design. Algorithms carry built-in biases, manipulate users, and fail to block harmful content. Her core question: why do designers create such experiences?
Her answer pointed to companies that ruthlessly design for growth. She cited examples of oppressive design, from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to hostile architecture designed to prevent rest in public spaces, and digital dark patterns like The New York Times subscription cancellation flow that forced users to call. The end goals are always the same: more data, more time, more money. Employee performance tied to OKRs amplifies this dynamic.
Zhou proposed redesigning the design process to avoid perpetuating existing power systems. Her framework adds evaluation and forecasting stages: asking whether a problem is ethically worthy of being solved, whether any ethical violations could occur in implementation, and finally, monitoring for new issues after launch. She shared a toolkit and framework on this topic.
Her central insight was that forecasted consequences are often design problems. She suggests examining products through layers of effect:
- The primary layer is intended and known — Google Search is a search engine.
- The secondary effect is also known and intended — Google Search generates ad revenue.
- The tertiary effect is typically unintended — such as the biases documented in Safiya Umoja Noble’s “Algorithms of Oppression.”
Designers should consciously define and design ethical primary and secondary effects, while forecasting tertiary effects to prevent harm.
Is Atomic Design Dead?
Brad Frost began with a history of the web, from the first website to web components, before noting that design systems inform and influence products and vice versa. He identified three problematic patterns: design system teams isolated in an “ivory tower,” design system “police” punishing any team member who detaches an instance, and product roadmaps consuming design system work entirely.
Frost walked through the foundations of atomic design — atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages — using Instagram as an example. His answer to the titular question was that atomic design remains useful as a mental model for balancing design systems and product needs.
The more forward-looking part of his talk considered what comes next. He proposed a collaborative global design system: rather than wasting human potential re-designing date pickers, the community could jointly build an unstyled component that each team styles for themselves.
He also addressed AI, referencing Luke Wroblewski’s talk. Frost described his ongoing project with Kevin Coyle: converting a codebase and its documentation into a format GPT-4 can understand. After a live demo generating an alert component via ChatGPT, Frost’s main point was that AI’s genie is already out of the bottle, making responsible use essential. The closing message centered on directing human potential toward more valuable work than designing yet another date picker.
The Legend Behind the Talks
In his opening remarks, Vitaly teased the audience with a hidden thread running through all the presentations. By the closing session, the reveal came: the talks were connected by the theme of "legends," a nod to the folklore behind Antwerp itself. The city's name is said to derive from "hand werpen" — "to throw a hand" — referencing a tale of a giant who extorted tolls from river travelers until a soldier cut off the giant's hand and flung it across the water, freeing the city.
That motif surfaced in unexpected places throughout the day: Molly Hellmuth referenced Bigfoot, Stéphanie brought up Prometheus, Nick included the word "myth" on a slide, Oliver used a typeface typical of fairy tales, Christine mentioned Sisyphus, and Kat spoke of Pandora's box.
A Personalized Surprise
The Smashing team added a personal touch to the conference experience by running a hidden challenge for the best sketch notes. Winning that challenge came with a custom-built avatar, illustrated by Smashing Magazine's own artist, Ricardo.
Beyond the Stage
The event had more to offer than the talks highlighted here. The full schedule is available online, and recordings of the sessions can be viewed for those who could not join in person.
Marc Thiele's photo collection captures the atmosphere of the event, set in the historic Bourla venue. Readers can also find details about upcoming Smashing conferences on the official website.
Catching Up on What You Missed
For anyone interested in watching the presentations, recordings have now been released — footage from the talks has been shared publicly. The next design and UX SmashingConf in Antwerp is already planned for those hoping to attend the sequel in person.
