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Jeff Golenski
Designing consistency: Impact on agencies and their customers
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…
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Ballio Chan
On growing my intuition
I used to think I have pretty good intuition in design and creative. I come from the advertising agency world. In the ad world, things are done a certain way. When we create an ad campaign, we usually receive a request from a client with a problem to solve. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a…
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Ashleigh Axios
My Secret Sites
My portfolio site was on WordPress for years. I was really proud of not just the content of the website, but also the site itself. With it’s custom-designed theme, it was exactly what I wanted. After a good many years of ease and beauty, you’d probably think I’d feel grateful and complacent. I was for…
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Erin Casali
How stories ground our iterations from macro to micro
When reviewing generic design processes, we often see the same steps over and over, with different names and maybe split in slightly different ways. In practice, good design always follows at least three macro steps iterating one after the other in an infinite series: listening, thinking, and making. Yet, that’s just the foundation: how do…
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James Koster
In the business of building trust
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…
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Dave Whitley
Building trust with notifications
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…
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Desiree Zamora Garcia
Why all designers should do customer support
All new hires at Automattic are required to spend three weeks as a Happiness Engineer, solving…basically anything one can create with a WordPress.com site. Plus anything that the phrase “systems thinking” adds to its scope. Many years ago, I had a stint at Apple as a Genius, which meant that it was my job to…
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Joen A.
Invisible
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…
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sixhours
The Curious Mind
“Start from curiosity. Welcome and seek out difference.” The Dotcom Design team recently completed a series of user interviews in an attempt to better understand small businesses and their needs. We heard from small business owners in a wide range of fields; everything from photography to handmade crafts to coaching clients. These folks came from diverse…
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Mel Choyce
Seeking out Stories
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…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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