Smashing Conference Freiburg 2026

This year, we headed back to Freiburg im Breisgau for Smashing Conference, on September 8 and 9, 2026 🏰🇩🇪🆓☀️.

Three threads ran through the event: AI and design systems, deeply technical CSS and HTML topics, and more human talks about teams and mindset. Here's what we took away.

TJ Pitre opened the conference with a simple observation: between Figma and code, everything eventually drifts. Nobody makes a mistake, and every change is reasonable. But after a few releases, neither source can be trusted anymore.

His answer: make the design system readable for AI. He describes five layers of context: tokens, components, composition rules, product policy and engineering rules. Most teams stop at the first two. Yet every gap becomes a guess for the AI. Two live demos illustrated the point: FigmaLint to validate a component, then the Figma MCP to go from design to code. He sees a new role emerging, the "Context Engineer". AI covers 80 to 90% of the way, and this role fills in the rest. At our agency, the Figma MCP paired with Claude Code is already part of how we work, but the talk made it clear why the quality of the source file matters so much. To dig deeper, TJ Pitre's slides are online.

Eva Ferreira reminded us that i18n is first and foremost about culture. A flag is not a language, and Spanish has several words for the same fridge. AI speeds up good processes… and bad ones too.

On the technical side, the golden rule: never concatenate sentences. English has a simple grammar that gives us bad habits. In German or Spanish, gender and word order change everything. The target language decides where the variable goes. For "temporary" machine translation, she recommends guardrails: translate in the PR with your agent, provide context and a shared glossary, then get it reviewed. And add CI checks: intact variables, missing keys, assembled sentences.

Joe Natoli talked about personal growth and team communication. His message: don't bury your frustrations. Talk to your manager about them and trust yourself.

Sarah Thompson (NN/g) started from a reassuring idea. Tech moves at full speed, but our brains haven't changed in 40,000 years. We're still designing for the same human.

For her, all our decisions are emotional first. Our brain constantly weighs costs and gains: mental effort, social connection, emotional reaction, physical effort, resources, time. Each axis becomes a design question. Does the user understand within a few seconds? Do they feel safe and in the right place? Can we offer them an immediate reward? In a fundraising case study, this approach increased high-level goals by 50%.

Jake Archibald closed the day with the customisable <select>. He traced the history of workarounds, especially around <dialog>. He showed the new properties for accessibility and dynamic behavior. Good news: Firefox support is coming soon.

This year's mystery speaker was Heydon Pickering, and it was probably the most fun talk of the conference. He makes music with HTML tags. It all starts with an element that plays a simple bell sound. Then he adds scripted arpeggios, guitar-pedal-style effects, and a bit of randomness to make it all feel more human. The result is surprisingly musical. Check out his project at hyperblam.how.

Vitaly Friedman showed us interfaces more than twenty years old: dozens of fields, monospace type, everything tiny. It hurts the eyes. But this software is used seven hours a day, and has been for years. If it survived, it's because it works.

His message: legacy software isn't broken. It does exactly what it was designed to do. According to him, 75% of modernization projects fail. The culprits: hidden dependencies, exhausted teams, the feature-parity trap and an approach that's too tech-centric. He argues for a "restoration" mindset: modernize what works, with users, rather than rebuilding everything. And to convince leadership, you need to talk ROI (return on investment): put a number on what the project costs, and what it saves in time and money.

Lyra Rebane, who hunts security bugs in Chrome, "clicked on every MDN page" to bring back little-known CSS properties: backface-visibility, shape-outside, -webkit-box-reflect, @media (scripting), device-posture for foldable screens…

The heart of the talk was UI hijacking. On a fake bank, "Swagbank", she showed how an innocent-looking button can trigger a money transfer, using CSS alone. Same thing with a booby-trapped drag and drop or a contenteditable field. Fascinating, and never to be reproduced in production. Bonus: her slides are themselves built in HTML and CSS, with her open source tool heartslides.

Marie van Driessche was born deaf. She gave her talk in sign language, with an interpreter. One of the highlights of the conference.

She reminded us that digital barriers are real barriers. A form that requires a phone number already excludes some people. Sign language isn't universal, and it isn't the same as written language. There is no "average" deaf user. Her advice works for everyone: short sentences, clear headings, one idea per paragraph, captions. In fact, 80% of people who turn on captions aren't deaf. She's wary of solutions designed without the people concerned, like gloves that translate sign language. Her motto: "Nothing about us, without us."

Emma Bostian talked about the right to be wrong. Even brilliant people make mistakes, especially on polarizing topics. We should look for the reasons we might be wrong, not the ones that prove us right.

On the team side, conflict over ideas is useful, while personal conflict is destructive. She cited a striking study: teams with psychological safety report more mistakes, but make fewer of them. Psychological safety doesn't mean lowering standards. It's a culture of respect and openness. A talk leaning toward management and project management.

Hidde de Vries closed with a committed, unifying talk. For him, the web should be sustainable, ethical, accessible, fun, and above all ours. Digital emits more than aviation, and a website's weight is a choice. Tech isn't neutral, and too much of the web belongs to the giants.

Faced with rising exclusionary rhetoric, his message was clear: every accessible site, every independent blog, every shared link strengthens a web that belongs to everyone. An open, plural and decentralized web is a counterweight to power. And we, designers and devs, are the ones building it.

His call to action: publish on your own site first, link between blogs, favor the fediverse.

Not much tech, but it feels good to hear a whole room applaud this kind of message. A great way to wrap up.

To finish, we were treated to a rather special guided tour of Freiburg. Back to 1599: our guide, an actress, played Catharina Stadellmenin, widow of a master of the locksmiths' and blacksmiths' guild. Accused of witchcraft, she fell victim to the witch hunts that raged in Freiburg at the time.

From the Town Hall square to the lanes of the old town, she led us through the places that marked her life, telling us her tragic story. Immersive, theatrical and beautiful.

This 2026 edition talked a lot about AI, but above all about what surrounds it: the context we give it, the processes it speeds up, and the humans who stay at the center. Whether it's a design system, a translation, old software or a deaf audience, the message keeps coming back: design with people, not just for them.

We're heading home with a few concrete to-dos: measure the drift between our Figma files and the code, ban concatenated sentences in our translations, and review our content with shorter sentences. And, thanks to Hidde, the urge to revive our personal projects and blogs!

Thanks also to Tobi, the DJ who set the rhythm of the breaks over both days.

See you next year.