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…