Smashing Magazine’s primary goal is to deliver quality material for designers and web-developers. Writing takes time; a close examination of recent developments and current tools takes time; and finally preparing the article for our readers takes time. To provide our readers with even more good stories and useful insights we can use your help.

Who can become a Smashing author?

You. However, you need to have experience as a blogger or an author. If it’s the case please follow the following guidelines:

send us an e-mail (s. below) with a brief description of yourself, your skills and your field of interests, include URLs to some articles and examples in your e-mail (don’t send whole articles, just URLs if possible), include some suggestions for topics and articles you’d be glad to explore and write about. It’s very important for us that you are really interested in the topics you’re willing to write about. A single article is excellent, long-term cooperation is even better.

An article doesn’t have to be extremely long; what is important is that you have something to say or to share. E.g. you can discuss interesting software or useful web-tools. You can share your ideas with fellows developers and review some life-savers you use every day in your work.

We are aiming at exciting, creative articles that also cover recent developments in the industry. We also can use some help in creating lists and compilations of information related to a given topic. We’ll provide you with detailed guidelines, so you know exactly what we expect and what we are interested in. How might such an article look like? Take a look at the example for a guest article. Further reading: Why Guest Blogging is a Powerful Way to Gain Exposure for Your Blog.

Our topics

Our main interest is the design and development of web-sites. What are concrete topics we write about? The list of tags in the upper area of the page (”Popular tags”) offers an overview of the subjects covered in our magazine. However, we prefer the following topics:

CSS – theory, practice, ideas, creative solutions, useful tools for web-developers, life-savers etc., software for designers and web-developers, Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator, Wordpress, Textpattern and other weblog-engines (CMS, Wikis etc. also possible), icons, fonts, themes, templates we can offer our visitors for free.

What do we expect?

Each article published on Smashing Magazine needs to meet our quality guidelines which is why not every guest article can be published; however, we strongly believe that there are dozens of designers, developers or just enthusiasts out there who have something to say and something to share or would like to help us out in our daily research.

So what do we expect from our guest writers? Not much:

you like to explore trends and present examples of sites where these trends are used (showcases) or you have fresh ideas you would like to present (how-to) or you know excellent sources for high-quality goodies (e.g. wallpapers, icons etc.) or creative works (designer’s posters, products etc.) and would like to support us during our research (graphics, monday inspiration).

Or…

you want to release high-quality freebies — icons, themes, plugins etc. and gain broad coverage on Smashing Magazine (freebies) or you want to present your work in a step-by-step-tutorial (tutorials). If you think you fit to at least one of this criteria contact us — we want you, we need you, we can’t live without you and we would really be happy to have you in our Smashing team.

Are authors getting paid?

Of course! The amount of money depends on the volume of the article and its quality. Before the article goes live we make sure both sides agree upon the publishing & payment conditions. It is also possible to put a link to the author’s web-site.

Sounds good?

Contact us. We are always glad to make new contacts and explore new possibilities. We’d be glad to have you in our smashing team!

First press that button! Yes the one that says "Become a fan", then have a browse around and don't forget to come back here to buy the Smashing Book! ;-)

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.