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…

For many small business owners, building a web presence is like trying to build a puzzle without knowing what the end result looks like. You can see how a few pieces fit together, but it’s not until you start filling in the edges — building on the work you’ve already done — that it starts…

As someone who spent several years squarely in the Engaged DIY-er camp working hard on my side hustle, I should know them. But I’m starting to realize something that never really fully clicked for me then. I’ll try my best to articulate. A Tricky Name. A Misleading Image.  The name “Engaged DIY” conjures up an…

As a former freelancer I would have been considered a small business owner at one point. I was managing all aspects of the business which operated under my name. There were definitely some areas that I neglected early on and the main one was marketing or “getting myself out there”. Producing the work itself was…

Earlier this summer, the Dotcom Design team performed a quantitative segmentation study on a collection of small business to gain a better understanding of their needs and expectations as it relates to having a web presence. Before joining a8c, I ran a small business offering contract web design and development services. The majority of my…

This past May, the WordPress.com design team set out to undertake the largest research study that the company had ever done. We spoke to 34 small business owners across the United States over the course of two weeks. Now that a few months have passed, the one thing that has stuck with me is the…

I once worked on a project for rebranding a small Japanese baby stroller brand. Considering how difficult and cumbersome it still is to travel with a stroller in Japanese cities, this said stroller brand’s designs were unusually large, and equipped with heavy wheels. There are still many train stations in Japan without elevators and the…

Automattic recently conducted extensive research on small business owners (SBOs), looking into their behaviors, preferences, and motivations around both building websites and business in general. The design team was tasked with reading through this research to find something that challenged our previous notions about SBOs. My initial read proved fairly uncontroversial as most of my…

For so long, WordPress.com (and, in some ways, WordPress itself) has been very focused on blogging. But we’ve known for a while (perhaps since the introduction of Pages all those years back) that WordPress can do more than blogs. WordPress is being used by businesses all over the world to help them sell their products…

Alright, yes, as a general rule, you should avoid using jargon as much as possible. However, there are some situations when speaking the jargon can be very helpful. 

Michael D. Watkins wrote about the seven seismic shifts of perspective and responsibility required for how managers become leaders in his piece for Harvard Business Review by the same name. In this article, he shares that “all of the shifts a function head must make when first becoming an enterprise leader involve learning new skills…

There’s nothing quite like finding out you’re wrong. I’ve shared previously about the research I was able to take part in as a designer at Automattic. Meeting Small Business Owners from across the United States on video calls, learning about their lives, their fears, their challenges, and the kind of work they do. I pored…

This quote from a WordPress.com customer caught my eye recently: It just really helped me to solidify what I really want my business to be. I don’t need this big huge gigantic “American dream” of the million-dollar business. It made me really realize what I want for my business — which is I always want…

We’ve been thinking about making the WordPress.com experience more attractive to small business owners for a while. But recently we’ve been learning things that made us question some of the ideas we had about how to do it, and helped us come up with some new ones. We started talking to actual small business owners.…

I’ve never run a business of my own —since I started working for a living, I’ve always done it for other people. Of course I’ve had personal projects, but it never got to the point that I had to deal with the difficulties and challenges of running a business, an actual company. Probably because of…

As a foodie, I’m always on the hunt for the next best food spot in town. I’ve bookmarked a bunch of places and have subscribed to local magazines to make sure I don’t miss new foodie spot announcements and food festivals in my area. The first thing I do before making a reservation or driving…

Websites are important to me. Not only because they’re how I make a living — though that’s a major factor! But they’re also an invaluable tool for me when I’m faced with tackling the unknown. Two years ago now, I bought my first house. Home ownership forced me to navigate information and services that were…

The purpose isn’t to shock and awe you. You may even guess what will happen next. Or at least, you won’t be surprised. This is okay! It doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. Recently, I was part of two foundational research studies, each for different products. In both, I heard different co-workers say…

Tinkering on websites has been a thing for me since the late ‘90s. The first site I made was an Angelfire powered, unsanctioned site for the local ski hill. (Corel draw, java applets, and embedded weather gifs, oh my!) Over the years I’ve continued to tinker, creating new sites for myself, and friends. Learning new…

I’ve run a few businesses in the past, and can tell you from first hand experience, it is no joke. I ran a physical products business using WordPress, and WooCommerce. I went from focusing on just design (pre business), to focusing on everything (while running business). Before starting the business, I was aware of the…

As designers we often do research or get research insights by a specialized team. This research work is always impactful and can lead to smaller and large changes. Over the years, I realized that one of the challenges of research — especially the kind that is wider, deeper, and richer — is to make it…

Not too long ago, my coworkers produced a report to help understand small business owners. It’s filled with solid insights that will challenge your ideas on who small business owners are and where their priorities lie. I found, for myself it pointed out details I had overlooked, but, in hindsight, were staring me in the face.…

Creating work for myself has always been a challenge. It’s easy to get sucked into the possibility of the project and all it could be. I’m reminded of this challenge when I ask a client or colleague to define their first-ever creative brief. I empathize with the ways in which that’s a difficult task to…

My father ran his own business for most of his professional life. I always admired that he was able to venture out on his own and not take the easier route of working for someone else. I grew up knowing that running a small business was not easy, to say the least. Not only did…

As folks who design and build website creation tools, we tend to be very focused on just that: Creation. The birthing of the shiny new website that we know will help our customers achieve all their business goals and dreams. But sometimes, when we are wrapped up in perfecting this birthing process, we neglect to…

When I was in my early teens, I started using a tool called ResEdit to customize the splash screens of applications on my computer. I opened the original splash screen image files in GraphicConverter, added some new photos or text, and spliced my new graphic back into the application. Later, whenever I’d launch my web browser,…

Innovation done right is about understanding the soul of a thing — an object, a process, a piece of software. Furthermore, it is about using new technologies, contexts, or approaches to more effectively express that soul.

“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.” Pink Floyd When I was in school and later studying part-time at college, I founded several small online businesses. There was a freelance WordPress design service, multiple blogs, design showcases, commercial WordPress themes and even an audacious attempt to emulate the…

Recently, our product team conducted a research on small business owners who happen to be a significant part of the WordPress.com customer base. In the report, there was one thing that stuck with me so clearly I kept thinking about it: A “website first” approach may turn potential small business customers off. A perfect website isn’t our…

The WordPress.com design team recently completed a customer research study with small business owners. Reading through the report, this line stood out to me: All business owners expressed some element of feeling like an imposter and concerns they were doing key things wrong I’ve always admired and looked up to small business owners. The idea…

Earlier this year, I was one of the many designers at our company that participated in a an in-depth study about small business owners to determine how we might build our products to serve them better. We kicked things off with a segmentation study that helped us break down and prioritize the vast landscape of…

We all make assumptions all the time. In fact you likely made an assumption about this article before you clicked on it. It’s human nature for our brains to fill in blanks and make connections based on very few inputs. The problem with going from gut rather than factual knowledge is that more often than…

Recently, Automattic design and research teams paired up to conduct a foundational research study to learn more about small business owners. One of the insights that immediately stood out as I made my way through the study, is that while having an online presence is crucial, a website is seen as something accessory to what…

I know I need to be writing articles. […] Do that for me. I hate writing articles. I despise it. “I despise it”  – these words from one of our customer interviews caught my eye, as they are pretty strong. I can empathise with this feeling though. Not that long ago I was a small business owner myself, and I despised…

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my dentist. Like most dentists I’ve been to, it’s a small operation — basically just one dentist and a couple of assistants. They’re not necessarily interested in marketing or growing their business. No Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter account. They’re not interested in reaching a new audience or being…

When I speak about my work as a Design Operations lead I often focus on the  three pillars of design operations to help ground the conversation in the framework of Process, People, and Projects and the partnerships that unlock more effective ways of working. This is a helpful framework because it outlines the distinct areas…

In recent months, we’ve done a fair amount of research on small business owners, and how a website can help them find their presence on the web. As I paged through some of the results recently, an interesting pattern began to emerge: many of the aspects of a service that are appreciated by small business,…

When I was younger and needed a plumber, I’d open up a thick phone book and sort through listings alphabetically. There were names like “Al’s Plumbing,” or “AA Plumbing,” and even an “AAA Plumbing.” All of them named alphabetically superior than the other to grab my attention first. If you were a business that didn’t…

Musings on Six Months as Head of Design Operations @Automattic – Part One Coming into my role as Head of Design Ops from a prior career in design consulting building out similar types of practice areas (think Program Management / Project Management / Production) I had some pretty definitive notions that I could basically apply everything…

Since the 1930s, many have tried to design a solid-body electric guitar. It was Leo Fender in 1950 and his iconic Telecaster that revolutionized the guitar manufacturing industry and propelled popular music into a completely new era. Even though today, it is more than half a century old and hundreds of more sophisticated designs have…

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. – Abraham Lincoln I’ve learned a lot of lessons as a designer/human over the years. More than anything, I’ve learned by making mistakes. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned along the way is that it’s…

Ready? Here goes: Be curious! Ask your customers questions. Observe their behavior. Welcome and seek out their differences. It’s the first principle of our fledgling design language: “Start from curiosity. Welcome and seek out difference.” What? You want your money back? The title did say it was simple. I’m sorry if you were expecting something…

Stories help shape reality. It helps paint the past, present, and future. Through stories we can prompt emotions, experiences, and vision. Stories are human. A great example of how stories can influence, and shape perception can be found in the animated movie “The Croods”. During two scenes in the movie, we get a glimpse at…

One of the first themes I launched on WordPress.com was Toujours. It was designed as a wedding theme, and included features like a Guestbook template, a slideshow, and special styles to highlight the three most recent posts. Like with all of our themes, the demo was built to look realistic, and match the kind of…

From Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, countless thinkers, artists, and inventors have acknowledged that intuition played a large role in their success. Intuition, for the purpose of this conversation, is defined as a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than from conscious reasoning. For a long time I have fought…

If I were to tell you that people couldn’t wait to stop using your product, how would you react? We may assume that there is something fundamentally broken with the product, a problem which must be fixed, because a well-designed product is one that people want to use. A good designer would work through that…

And no, we weren’t on the yellow brick road! Last week my son broke his arm and this prompted our first visit to the local hospital in a new country (we moved countries about 6 months ago) – something we were already apprehensive about as the medical system seemed to work differently here to what…

Start from curiosity. Welcome and seek out difference. I’ve written previously about our focus on accessibility with the WordPress mobile apps. Both iOS and Android provide an array of options focused at making their platforms fully accessible to everyone who might want to use them. Mobile apps get to benefit from these accessibility tools for…

One of the most common traps of product design is ending up designing for yourself. It’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s an entire planet full of people outside of your office and so starting project planning with user stories is an incredibly valuable way to stay grounded and is one of the core design…

Search for and tell stories about people, not just data. The lifespan of an open-source product is a funny thing. It starts with an idea that is shared with the world and from there, if the product gains a bit of traction, there is no way of knowing what will become of it. The rise…

For the past couple months a team of designers has been neck deep in user research and exercises designed to help us absorb and synthesize everything we’ve learned. We started from curiosity: how can we better solve the problems small business owners are facing? We got the chance to talk with over 30 small business…

Prior to my time at Automattic, I worked at a direct marketing firm. We were taught to mind the data. You make a change, you test it, you check the data and make a decision from it. At the time, this seemed fool proof. Numbers and statistics are absolute after all, right? However, continually we’d…

Start from curiosity. Welcome and seek out difference. – Automattic Design Principle Whether we intend to have one or not, we all have our bubbles. It’s the place we naturally gravitate to because we know it’s comfortable and safe. Stepping outside of that bubble requires curiosity and a willingness to get uncomfortable. Running user interviews…

We have gut feelings, instincts, and intuition for a reason. Often those reasons are sound — even if we can’t articulate them. But sometimes the reasons are rubbish. Inconvenient as it may be, as single notes in the chorus of earth’s 7.6 billion, our intuition is not primordial, perfect, or universal. Intuition is useful to…

Designers at Automattic have one common goal that is clearly stated in our creed: I will never stop learning. It’s something that I refer back to when being challenged with a new idea, work method or model of interacting with people that feels foreign to me. It’s that initial fear of being exposed to a…

I’ve been on the periphery of the open source WordPress community for years now. I’ve attended one local WordPress meetup, one WordCamp, and I even helped design and produce a book about WordPress. Here at Automattic, the open source community is always close by. But up until a couple weeks ago, I’d never contributed directly…

Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. —Charles de Lint Ever since I first joined Woo, nearly 6 years ago, I always felt a sense of satisfaction working in support, knowing that I was helping enable…

In the early days of my career, I was quite fascinated with Flash. I wanted to be a cartoonist growing up so naturally, I was drawn to this tool that allowed me to create some pretty powerful animations. Over time, I learned it extensively, until it eventually became my expertise. I’ve built several full-Flash websites,…

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of people who use websites for all kinds of different things — fashion blogs, online portfolios, e-commerce stores, etc. Regardless of the type or purpose, there’s one common thing amongst all successful websites —TRUST. In business, trust can take many different forms and the more efficient you…

Search for and tell stories about people, not just data. Two months ago, I was invited by one of Jetpack’s engineering teams to join their week-long team meetup in Madrid, Spain. Most of our days involved the usual talks and workshops around the work we do day-to-day, but we dedicated one of our meetup days…

Theme designers at Automatic have a very important job — design themes, that will (potentially) be used by millions of people. But more importantly, these themes will represent our customers, or their businesses, to the world. This is a very exciting, and intimidating task. But how do you create a theme for millions, you ask?…

Simplicity builds trust. At Automattic we’ve been working through some overarching design principles to help guide our work. One of these core principles is that “simplicity builds trust.” Basically, the idea that the more straightforward a task is to do, the more confident a user is in their ability (or the product’s ability) to do…

Have you ever had to sit and watch someone struggle to do something on a computer or phone? They keep clicking the wrong thing or looking in the wrong place, pushing the wrong buttons, or using the wrong gestures. It’s a frustrating experience for everyone involved. My patience has grown with experience. Particularly in helping…

Stories are integral to human history and culture. Before we had written language, we had stories imprinted on the walls of caves with pigments made of ochre and soot. Before we had agriculture, we developed rich tapestries of myth, folklore, and legend. We use stories to teach, to entertain, to delight, to think through problems,…

Within a year or two of joining Automattic, I was part of a small team that was tasked to design and build an improved way of writing posts and pages on WordPress.com. The deadline was super fast but as the only designer on the team, I was excited to make this happen! As we were…

Several years ago, I was looking for a new challenge, and I decided it was a good time to stop hacking my HP-49g and start pointing my goals at new horizons. Shortly after, I discovered the awesome world of the Web and WordPress, and decided to work hard and learn everything about it. Still not…

In the last couple of months my work here at Automattic has been focused on designing the first version of a new internal tool to be used by our Happiness Engineers. It’s a tool that will at the very least make our coworkers’ day to day a little bit better, but hopefully will impact on…

No matter what type of work you do, you can easily focus on the details too much. Let’s say you’re learning guitar, and you worry about your strumming technique or type of strings you use before you can even play two chords. If you don’t start at the foundation of playing guitar, the chords that…

Early on in my career as a user experience analyst and researcher, I was part of a challenging project that forever changed the way I thought about product, research, and how we involve customers in our process. One of my clients at the time was a large Vancouver-based agency that specialized in e-commerce solutions. They…

Stories are powerful. For the last few months we have been immersed in the world of small business owners. This began with a series of over 40 interviews with small business owners; we used these to gain an understanding of their goals, needs and pains. Based on these insights, we began imagining an ideal world…

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” ― Isaac Asimov The biggest advantage of starting something new is a fresh perspective, whether it be a new job, a new hobby, or traveling to a new country for the first time. You…

“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…

Consistency builds trust. Speed builds trust. Simplicity builds trust. —Automattic Design Principle Lately, my focus has been revolving around landing pages and landing page systems. So while I was going through our design principles the other day, it struck me: All our potential customers go through the same micro funnels before they sign up through…

WordPress exists today because people contribute to it. They contribute in their evenings, weekends and lunch times. People choose to take WordCamp vacations, attend contribution days on a Sunday with their family. These volunteer contributors are the heartbeat of WordPress. They are the stories that whilst often unheard need listening to. Let’s be real, contribution…

If you’ve ever had to do anything moderately hard over a long period of time, failed at it, tried again, found some success, failed at it, tried again, and so on, looping on and on, you’ve probably in some way gone back to your first principles. Those foundational building blocks that lie deep beneath any…

A long time ago in a galaxy where I still currently reside, I was a marketing & product designer for several multimedia agencies focused on building marketing websites for small businesses. The platform of choice for these small businesses? You guessed it: WordPress. Most of us know WordPress as an open source platform that’s fairly…

2000. The millennium. Roger Federer is yet to grace the grass courts of Wimbledon. Wembley Stadium is due to host it’s final F.A Cup match before being rebuilt. Harry Potter is still a read-only experience. 9/11 is just a regular day in September. Feel old? It’s ok – me too. While momentous events were right…

When we launched the redesign of notifications a few years ago, it was one of the only WordPress.com features developed in tandem with all platforms. Although this exact principle wasn’t stated during development, the core values guided much of the process: Consistency builds trust. Speed builds trust. Simplicity builds trust. With these values in mind, we…

The best design is invisible. It is functional to the point that you forget how it works, you just use it. You might even forget it took effort to invent once upon a time. For any designer creating work for others, this can be a difficult realization to come to terms with. Perhaps what drove…

Earlier this year, I got involved with an organization called Get Her Elected, which seeks to pair women running for office across the United States with talented, remote volunteers. I spent the year following the 2016 elections full of anxiety and despair, fearing for my future safety and the safety of my family, friends, and countless…

As part of our latest Empathy Challenge, designers at Automattic were challenged to recreate an article using Gutenberg. Gutenberg is a new block based editor designed to simplify post creation and so I was happy to try it out! Here are my initial thoughts. I chose to recreate this article from longreads.com Total time: 27…

Try Gutenberg and share your thoughts as you try to re-create a blog post – seemed simple enough. Even though I had missed the deadline for this, I wanted to give it a try to see how it worked, and here are my results. Disclaimer: I tried using Gutenberg to re-create this post that was…

Back in Part 2 of this three-part tutorial series, we set up our website, planned out the structure of our site pages, and added in our main content. Now, it’s time to start customizing our site further by going through the following: Adding social media integrations and feeds Adding a blog with a few sample…

We were tasked with trying out Gutenberg. I actually half completed this task a couple of weeks back with a Longreads post but didn’t end up posting about it. So this morning I gave it another try, attempting to recreate this post on coffee. How did it go? It was an interesting experience, in total…

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between promise and present. The difference between expectations, hopes, dreams, visions — the optimistic future — and the “what needs to get done today to get things moving and building a solid foundation.” It’s partly on my mind because I’m a person excited about the future…

All designers at Automattic are tasked with quarterly empathy challenges to help us better look at our products from the perspective of our users. Our most recent task was to recreate an existing post using our new Gutenberg editor. While I’d definitely read a lot about the editor, I hadn’t actually gotten into the nitty…

Having spent a good chunk of the past couple months working on envisioning what Gutenberg might look like in the context or our native mobile apps, I found the newest design team Empathy Challenge an interesting one that got me thinking differently. Up until now, I’ve been mostly focused on the starts and ends of…

All of Automattic’s designers were recently challenged to try out the upcoming new WordPress post editor, Gutenberg. The task we were given was to choose a rich media post, such as a longform article from Longreads, and recreate its layout and formatting inside of Gutenberg. Gutenberg is a very ambitious project that aims to, eventually,…

I’ve played with Gutenberg but I haven’t actually used it to do something complex, yet. So I set off to re-create this story used in Longreads to see how far I could get. My overall read of the 30-minute fast sprint experience was: Creating spatial relationships is how I see the world — so I…

One Automattic designer’s experience copying a Longread’s post to recreate it with Gutenberg.

For this challenge I dug up an interesting article from Longreads called “Welcome to the Center of the Universe” and tried to recreate it using our Gutenberg plugin. Here’s a screen capture of how it went: It took about 26min to complete which is pretty quick by my standards. Much of the article’s content in…

Gutenberg is a codename for the project focusing on the entire publishing flow of WordPress. The first phase of this is the editor. For those of you that don’t know, Gutenberg works with everything being a block. Content is added by choosing block types, for example it could be an image, a gallery, a paragraph along…

Here’s my Gutenberg Empathy challenge. Generally, I enjoyed the experience. I had never used Gutenburg before and I generally found it easy to discover how it works by exploring and playing with it. I have made some assumptions about what is expected from Gutenburg – for example, I would expect themes to be able to…