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Brie Anne Demkiw
Designer Journeys 🗺️
Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I interview a lot of designers in the course of any given week. Less than half have taken the usual path to becoming a designer. Most took a more meandering route, stumbling upon design through some…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Being Wrong
“To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Tips for Hiring Designers for Remote Teams
Creating a great design team and designing great products means hiring great designers. Automattic has been hiring people around the world to work remotely for over 10 years. More recently, we’ve been scaling up and refining how we hire designers. Here are a few things we’ve learned along the way: Take advantage of limitless geographics.…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Hangout Life
One huge advantage of remote environments: Face time is a scarce resource. This is a good thing. It makes you treat it as a valuable resource — something you have to be careful not to waste. But remote meetings still have their own set of challenges. Here are a few things I’ve learned about running…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
It’s not about the page views
“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” ~Kurt Vonnegut Let’s face it: Blogging is hard. Writing — not to mention writing well — is challenging for most. You’re putting your thoughts and ideas out into the world, for the trolls and the fans alike. Maybe someone…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Designing Your Remote “Office”
Photo credit: Matteo Vistocco “So, where do your designers sit?” I was at a lunch table during a design leadership conference late last year, chatting with other leaders in the industry. This question left me…confused. I finally realized what we were talking about and laughed. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career working remotely. Figuring…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
The Messy Middle
“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” ~Helmuth Graf von Moltke Ever been in this scenario?: A new project starts. Everyone’s excited to jump in and get started. Everything is possible. Only good outcomes await and everything in this moment seems right with the world. You can feel the energy driving the team…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Running remote design sprints
I lead a team of designers who work on WordPress.com and other products. Last year, my team ran our first design sprint together in-person at a team meetup. It was a great way to kick off a new project and we became instant fans of the format. But Automattic is a remote company. Most of…
Photo by <a href="http://luca.blog" target="_blank">Luca Sartoni</a>. -
Brie Anne Demkiw
Travel, Design, & Beginner’s Mind
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” ~Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind I’m fortunate to get to travel internationally several times a year, both for work and personal trips. A few weeks ago, I hopped on a flight to Cuba. The country had been on my list for…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Kill Your Darlings
As designers, we spend most of our time solving problems for our users by building products. How can we save a user time on a task? How can we make an experience more delightful? What do we need to build to help a user accomplish their goal?
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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Automattic Design 