WRITING FOR A BETTER WEB

Based in a small city in Northern Spain, Cinta Arribas is an illustrator and visual artist with over ten years of professional experience. She studied Fine Arts in Salamanca and Kassel (Germany), and recently completed an artist residency in Washington, DC, through a program of the Spanish Embassy.

Meet our newest team members.

Automattic is distributed first, but we love getting together in this magic space.

Designing for open source software comes with gnarly challenges. Learn how WooCommerce is tackling them.

Twenty Twenty-Three, the new WordPress default theme is here, alongside WordPress 6.1.

Great design books can open our eyes to new possibilities and unlock new insights that lead to great design. We recently asked our designers which design books had left the greatest impact on them and their work. Here’s what they said.

A key part of distributed life is meetups. We plan them together, choose the location, dates, and activities, and then travel to meet there for work, and for fun. A perfect setting to get to know each other, work together, explore our surroundings, and create memories that last a lifetime. The Jetpack Design Team met…

Thanks to WordPress 5.9 and the evolution of Full Site Editing, it’s possible to design a fully-featured theme using just the Site Editor.

How I created a system that consistently helps me organize my thoughts and my time in a way that works for me.

How a year of experiments led to subtle changes with major impacts.

The Atavist Magazine, one of Automattic’s flagship longform publications, recently relaunched on WordPress.com. In this conversation, editor in chief Seyward Darby and art director Ed Johnson talk about the history, (re)design, and future of the magazine.

Go behind the scenes with the Jetpack Design team and see the process of how we crafted the 10th anniversary campaign.

The Designer Experience team at Automattic is uniquely tasked with designing programs and experiences for designers. Learn about our culture and community-building programs.

As a new addition to the design team at Automattic and a first-time contributor to the WordPress project, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about accessibility features in Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor. I wanted to create this blog post to introduce myself (and you) to the many useful accessibility features available and…

Matt Owens, a partner at creative studio Athletics, takes us inside education, innovation, and community with XQ Institute.

In a workplace, quick feedback is easy to come by. We just ask the person we’ve on our side, we walk by a trusted colleague, maybe we even ask a few people for a quick critique. It feels simple and lightweight. When remote, a lot of the ways we communicate change. Remote work requires and…

Automattic contributes to a number of non-profit and open source projects, including WordPress, which powers more than 30% of websites, including WordPress.com. As part of WordPress’ five for the future program, Automattic has a number of sponsored contributors who work alongside community members to further the project. In this post, Joen shares his perspective as…

Simplenote is Automattic’s free, open-source, note-taking app. We’ve been working hard to improve its usability and design across all platforms and wanted to promote the latest UX updates along with Simplenote’s fresh new look. An opportunity arrived in a new top-of-the-dashboard takeover ad unit on Tumblr — another member of Automattic’s family of products —which…

A behind-the-scenes look into the design of an Automattic theme.

There is currently a lot of excitement surrounding the block patterns that debuted in WordPress 5.5. A block pattern—pattern for short—is a predefined block layout; a collection of blocks or, occasionally, even a single block can make up a pattern. Think of it as a pre-made, artful chunk of a web page that you can…

With music, design, and really any creative endeavor I take on, the idea of making “something out of nothing” drives me. The “nothing” here is the often unpredictable process of capturing small, abstract ideas and finding subtle and unexpected inspiration in them.

If I wanted a career like his, I would have to seek deeply in my soul.

Alternate title: Pick-a-little, Talk-a-little Over the last 18 months or so, I’ve logged 200+ hours of moderating, watching, and reading user research sessions. Entrepreneurs with dreams of success, bloggers who love murder mysteries, and everyone in-between. When thinking about lessons to draw from these sessions, I returned to a note I scribbled while watching someone…

For the past few months we’ve been converting WooCommerce widgets in WordPress to blocks. Widgets allow you to add a small feature, such as a paragraph of text, onto your website.  I recently did a talk at WooSesh where I went over the work we’ve been doing. You can checkout the video, and also read…

Cowritten with Megs Fulton Many of us design and build apps in air-conditioned offices in major cities, using the latest devices with perfect internet connections. We don’t often think about how apps should work without a strong internet connection.   It’s no wonder so many apps feel clunky or broken with a flaky internet connection,…

Recently, the design team I lead was going through a period of low morale. I noticed this through conversations in 1-1s, our team Slack channel, and most notably in our team meetings. The designers were all working on some very big product problems and while the work was really challenging, the rewarding aspect seemed to…

Last week we held our first “Design Collaboration Meetup” connecting across product, dev, support, marketing, and human resources. And of course … design! At the gathering we were able to distribute our new playbooks and connect IRL in super high-bandwidth form compared with how we normally operate as a fully-distributed company. The gathering was opened…

At the end of every week, my boss asks us to write down a lesson we learned. Mine are usually due to a slip up I made. Here’s how it goes: I make a mistake, apologize to the person, and end up saying something along the lines of: “I should have done x, lesson learned…

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…

I recently shared a video I created (with the fantastic Caresse Haaser) that explored the spaces of the open web in contrast to the more closed environments that have dominated our recent online experiences. As part of that project, we shared the source materials on GitHub and asked for others to translate the meditation into…

Dave Martin is one of the world’s most experienced distributed designers and design leaders. I first found out about Dave’s work by reading one of his old blog posts where he described the challenges when hiring for an all-distributed design team. Dave left Automattic in 2015 for new adventures, and then three years later came…

I don’t have a formal design background. I had to learn everything the hard way through the usual methods. Diving into, or letting myself get thrown into, the deep end of the pool. Working hard to learn as much as I could whenever I could. Asking lots of questions. Admitting what I don’t know to…

I learned how to change the oil in my car before I could drive. Twenty years later, I still change it myself. Sure, I could have someone else do it in the same amount of time for the same amount of money, but I think its important to get under the hood yourself. I feel…

This post originally appeared on filippodt.com. Wikipedia defines a silver bullet as “a metaphor for a simple, seemingly magical, solution to a difficult problem”. Working in product development, I have come across my share of silver bullets and every time they end in the same way. First with disappointment and then the additional hard work…

Kelly Hoffman: Design is now so many things! At its essence it’s identifying and solving problems. / Pablo Honey: Design is a practice that strives for better “(blank)” with the right balance of form and function. / Ian Stewart: Design is like drawing the essence out of something, for someone. It might be a message,…

The Mayor of Saint Étienne, France cordially kicked off a two-hour long presentation on #DesignInTech in a collaboration between Automattic Design and the Material Design team at Google. Complete context for the collaboration is available on our aptly named microsite: https://materialdesignandautomatticdesigninfrance.blog/ Direct jump to talks by Dave Martin | Jeff Ong | Kunal Patel |…

Renowned design leaders Bethany Heck and Joshua Goldenberg have joined the Automattic Design team.

We have a new microsite coming up at the easy-to-remember 😉 URL: 👉materialdesignandautomatticdesigninfrance.blog There you can learn about a few easy ways to learn about the systems-thinking aspects of the Material Design system. So far we’ve posted about the Elevation Table and the Tonal Stairs. And there’s more to come in the next days ahead.

Like many other companies with expansive digital products, Automattic (makers of WordPress.com) has recently dedicated a significant amount of energy into creating a design language system that we call Muriel. This new design system is ambitious and could reach a wide range of products, potentially transforming our process at Automattic. With only a small team,…

The first thing a child draws looks like a circle. People spontaneously arrange themselves in a circle when they need to observe something close up, and this led to the origin of the arena, the circus, and the stock exchange trading posts. Bruno Munari, “La Scoperta del Cerchio (The Discovery of the Circle)” 1964 At…

Concept by Adam Becker and Brie Anne DemkiwImages by Marly GallardoText by Ian Stewart We call our design process “deep design” per a talk I gave at WordCamp Europe in 2018. It emerged from the realization that by being so technology-focused, we spent a disproportionate time on Planet Deliver. So we needed to consider the…

At the end of 2018, we launched the inaugural edition of the Automattic Design Awards, a program intended to honor the best design work in the WordPress ecosystem. There are beautiful websites built with WordPress, there are plugins and other features that extend the functionality of WordPress in elegant and thoughtful ways. The more we…

Building design systems is hard. What makes it even harder is that a lot of these teams are very small, sometimes even comprising a single person. This can sometimes leave design systems practitioners feeling isolated and overwhelmed. The power of community can help to remove this feeling of isolation, making you feel connected to something…

I’m from Japan, where New Year is particularly important. It’s a time for observing detailed rituals and customs (exchanging new year cards, eating particular food, going to the shrine or temple), quietly reflecting on the past year, as well as preparing for what is to come in the new year. It’s also the one time…

It was my daughters 16th birthday and I had spent well over a year planning a surf trip for us to Portugal. I pictured us surfing off into the sunset, eating amazing food, and bonding without inhibitions. The ultimate mother daughter experience. My mother passed away when I was 16 therefore this milestone birthday was…

Entries for the 2018 Automattic Design are due November 16 We were fortunate to have Nervous System computationally design, a-hem “grow,” the Automattic Design Award trophy. Nervous Systems’ website demonstrates their astounding experiments as artists, designers, and entrepreneurs. From a tree-like form to be used in a 4-dimensional zoetrope, to their online shop selling jewelry…

The WordPress.com design team (and friends) recently conducted extensive user research around small business owners and their experiences, as you may have already read elsewhere on this blog. The team spoke to 34 entrepreneurs, gaining insight into the stresses and joys of their day-to-day lives, with the goal of learning how we, as Automattic, can…

As an industry, we’ve been proclaiming the good news of mobile-first for years. Yet as much as we talk the talk, we don’t always walk the walk. It’s not a bad thing; things are just rarely black or white in real life and in our day-to-day work. Earlier this year, the Automattic design team conducted…

Automattic Design recently engaged in a “deep dive” customer research project to understand the psychology of small business owners. The underlying reason behind making this work happen has been our knowledge that roughly half the small businesses in the world don’t have a website. And since we’re a company that makes, among many things, website-making…

Recently, the WordPress.com design team spoke to 34 small business owners across the United States as part of a research project. The data gathered was vast, and incredibly insightful, but one thing has been sticking in my head after reading the results; Small business owners want partners more than vendors This goes to a fundamental part of…