Automattic is a digital company, with digital products. We don’t get to hold the things we make in our hands, instead we interact with them through computers and mobile devices. Even our interactions with the people who use our products are digital and text based.
Beyond that, our team at Automattic is distributed internationally, and work remotely from wherever they want. And that means that even our day to day interactions with team mates are digital. Apart from video calls and our in person team meetups that happens couple of times through the year, we’re mostly interacting in digital ways.
It’s about the people.
Events are an important and valuable opportunity for Automattic to engage with the ‘real world’, and to interact with the people who use our products in person.
Through our presence at various trade shows, conferences, meetups and other community events we’re able to amplify our brand and deliver our message and personality in a way that digital interactions can’t replace. Being able to sit down with someone who uses our products and talk about their successes (and frustrations) is one of the best ways to understand the way our products are being used.
Consistency across products.
We have a variety of different products under the Automattic name – Jetpack, WordPress.com and WooCommerce being some of the more prominent ones. Events are an opportunity for us to deliver all these different brands in a cohesive package.
Explaining the different products, how they work together, how they differ from each other, and how they all come together to provide you with necessary tools to build your website, blog, or store is all part of what happens at events. This calls for consistency across our marketing messaging and collateral and means that our events team works closely with all the marketing teams of our different products to keep this messaging and presentation consistent.
What does it look like?
In terms of designable things at events, there can be quite a lot that goes into preparing for an event. Depending on the size of the event and activation, we can have anything from a simple table setup with one or two staff members with some swag and brochures, to a full 20’x20’ trade show booth with printed and digital collateral and a team of people staffing the event. Here’s a highlight reel of some our events in 2017:
Design ultimately plays a supporting role at events. It is important for us to look good and present ourselves in a certain way, but at the end of the day the real value of events are in the interactions we can have with people who use our products. Good events design will facilitate and encourage these interactions.
Automattic Design 