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.