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New Front-End Adventures, 2025 Edition

Vitaly Friedman
Your instructor
Vitaly Friedman
Tickets
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Workshop includes:

  • 🔖  Examples to take away
  • 🗣  Interactive sessions
  • 📺  Workshop recordings
  • 🎤  Dedicated Q&A time
  • 🏅  Smashing Certificate

Workshop, 5×2h + Q&A Mon & Tue, Jan 27 – Feb 10 2025
09:00 – 11:30 AM PT 18:00 – 20:30 CET Check your time zone

What’s the State of Front-End in 2025? With the European Accessibility Act, WCAG 2.2, new HTML elements, design systems, HTTP/3, TypeScript, AVIF, CSS container queries, early hints, bfcache, Core Web Vitals, Variable Fonts, revamped HTML Email and shiny sparkly AI. We all are still trying to figure out just the right strategy for building websites and apps efficiently. How do we do that, and how do we achieve it within a reasonable amount of time?

So what are some of the exciting new features that have landed in browsers recently? How do we write CSS and JavaScript these days? What should we keep in mind around accessibility, privacy, sustainability and web performance? How do we architect a flexible and maintainable design system? Well, roll up your sleeves: in this workshop, we’ll cover it all.


Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

  • Interactive live sessions

    5 × 2.5h live sessions

  • Practical insights

    From filters and sorting, to search and autocomplete

  • Checklists

    20 checklists for everything from accordion to maps

  • Life-time access

    To all video recordings and examples

  • Dedicated Q&A time

    To ask all your questions

  • Smashing Certificate

    A well-deserved reward for your work


$350.00 $450.00 Register for this workshop → 5 × 2h live sessions + Q&A. Jan 27 – Feb 10.
With all video recordings & slides. Get a ticket.

🎪  Save up to 25% on this workshop with a Smashing Membership.

In this workshop, Vitaly Friedman, consultant for the European Parliament and co-founder of Smashing Magazine and front-end/UX consultant, will be looking into the state of front-end in 2025, with new challenges and new opportunities, and how we can utilize all of those wonderful shiny web technologies we have available today.

We’ll also explore how to deal with legacy code base and dated technologies, and will cover dozens of front-end techniques that will help your websites and apps to stay relevant, flexible and accessible for years to come. Beware: you won’t be able to unlearn the things that you’ll learn in the workshop!


In This Workshop, We Will Explore:

  • Front-End Accessibility 2025, with techniques, strategies and tooling for dyslexia-friendly websites, older adults, colorblindness, mental health issues, considerations for WCAG 2.2 and design patterns to keep sites and apps accessible,
  • State of CSS 2025 (CSS Grid, container queries, style queries, cascade layers, relational selector :has, CSS subgrid, scroll snapping, scoped styles),
  • How to organize, write and maintain CSS, incl. BEM, Tailwind, ITCSS, CUBE CSS, and how to deal with CSS container queries, maintainability, leaking styles and global scope,
  • State of JavaScript 2025, ES2022/ES2023, progressive/partial (re)hydration, islands architecture, Astro, bundlers, tooling and how to manage performance bottlenecks,
  • State of Web Performance 2025, with optimizations for critical path, early hints, priority hints, Back-Forward cache, Interaction To Next Paint (INP) and Core Web Vitals,
  • SSR + CSR, and how to navigate the space, with resumability, Qwik, prerendering and static rendering, static site generators and where and how they fit,
  • New UI Features, including passwordless authentication, new color spaces (display-p3 vs. sRGB, OKLCH, OKLAB, HSL), View Transitions API, new accessibility features,
  • Design Systems 2025, how to build, design and maintain successful design systems, with design handoff and case studies,
  • State of AI and Digital Sustainability in 2025, how to integrate AI into an existing workflow, when to use AI and what AI can’t do, how to measure and reduce sustainability footprint.
  • Localization and internationalization techniques for managing multi-lingual experiences with a singular codebase, along with design patterns to keep in mind,
  • State of Web Components, CSS Houdini and Shadow DOM, how to use them today, case studies, and the roadmap for next years,
  • State of HTML Email, with new strategies for building cross-email client emails with <div> and without HTML tables,
  • GDPR and privacy legislation, with implications for web developers,
  • Maintenance issues and dealing with legacy browsers,
  • Component-based workflow and tooling,
  • Common front-end challenges and solutions and important new challenges and opportunities to keep in mind.

Who Is This Workshop For?

This workshop is intended for front-end developers and UI engineers, and everybody else who is dealing with front-end issues. You should be familiar with CSS and JavaScript, and be enthusiastic to deep dive into technical intricacies and browser internals.

What Hardware/Software Do You Need?

You’ll need to bring a lot of creativity with your preferred coffee mug. We’ll be spending a lot of time drawing, sketching, designing and thinking.

Be ready to challenge your general view of the AI design process and how our interface should look like. You’ll need a lot of sleep, since it’s going to be a packed day. Bring a lot of attention to detail and non-standard thinking to this one! ;-)

About Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running front-end/UX workshops and webinars. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems.

Time & Schedule

This remote workshop is split over five days. The schedule may change slightly based on how we are progressing through the material, giving time to answer questions as we go along. The workshop will be running from 9:00 AM PT to 12:00 PM PT on Tuesday and Wednesday on July 9–23.

  • Mon, January 27, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
  • Tue, January 28, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
  • Mon, February 3, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
  • Tue, February 4, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
  • Mon, February 10, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)

You can always re-watch the sessions at a more convenient time and follow the workshop at your own pace.

Day 1: State of the Web 2025

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
State of modern front-end architecture, tooling, important metrics, bottlenecks and user expectations. New web features and APIs, Web components, passkeys, client-side rendering, server-side rendering and static site generators.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Vitaly on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 2: HTML, Accessibility and Inclusive Design

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Inclusive design patterns for colorblindness, deafness, motion sickness, new HTML elements, SVG, guide to ARIA, WCAG 2.2 success criteria, European Accessibility Act (EAA), accessibility tree, debugging accessibility, tooling, measuring usability of accessibility, screen reader testing.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Vitaly on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 3: CSS

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Modern CSS reset, CSS Grid and subgrid, cascade layers, anchor positioning, logical properties, container queries, field-sizing, relational selector :has, View Transitions API, scroll snapping, scoped styles, style queries, new color spaces and relative color, late validation, organizing CSS.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Vitaly on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 4: JavaScript & Web Performance

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Partial prerendering, server components, Signals architecture, progressive and partial (re)hydration, resumability, script streaming and code caching, isInputPending(), breaking up long tasks. Core Web Vitals, INP, Performance Panel in DevTools, compression dictionaries, Brotli, WebP 2, debugging performance, optimizing for INP.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Vitaly on the day’s material. Networking!

Day 5: AI and Sustainability

8:45 AM PT
Virtual doors open, registration, chat and introductions.

9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
State of AI in 2025, how to integrate AI into an existing workflow, when to use AI and what AI can’t do, design patterns for helpful AI interfaces, what’s possible and feasible, how to create AI experiences to make them useful, effective and reduce sustainability footprint.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Q&A with Vitaly on the day’s material. Networking!

$350.00 $450.00 Register for this workshop → 5 × 2h live sessions + Q&A. Jan 27 – Feb 10.
With all video recordings & slides. Get a ticket.

🎪  Save up to 25% on this workshop with a Smashing Membership.