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John Maeda
Remote Work and Remote Designers
Hi there, For the 2018 #DesignInTech Report‘s coverage on “Remote Work and Remote Design” I’ve rounded up 25 posts from Automattic Designers on the topic. To learn more about how remote work companies work there’s a great article on Quartz and The Information for you to peruse. Enjoy! —JM Getting Started for Remote Designers Thoughts…
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Mel Choyce
Recreating “Here at the End of All Things” in Gutenberg
It’s that time again — another Empathy Challenge at Automattic! This edition’s challenge is to replicate a post to the best of our abilities in Gutenberg, the new editor coming to WordPress later this year. Because I’m a giant nerd and also because there was a variety of different content within the post, I selected…
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Brie Anne Demkiw
Hangout Life
One huge advantage of remote environments: Face time is a scarce resource. This is a good thing. It makes you treat it as a valuable resource — something you have to be careful not to waste. But remote meetings still have their own set of challenges. Here are a few things I’ve learned about running…
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John Maeda
React Components, Design, and WordPress.com (2015)
It’s been fun to learn about the history of the Automattic dev/design team’s early work on one of the first large-scale React-based user experience deployments — having taken to heart WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s impassioned request to the entire WP community to “Learn JavaScript deeply.” I was prompted to study our React-based design language’s history…
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Mel Choyce
Paying my way to success: a follow-up
You might remember last month when I wrote about paying for site views. That post was in response to a prompt from our Head of Design, John Maeda, to write about how a blogger could gain 1000 views with a budget of $20. The point of the exercise was to empathize with our blogging customers.…
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Filippo Di Trapani
Build, measure, learn for the win
One of the first projects I worked on at Automattic was a small A/B test for the first screen of the WordPress.com sign-up process. As the first screen in our funnel, it served a critical role, but it hadn’t been tested in quite some time. I tweaked the visual design and completely changed the copy for my…
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Kitty Lusby
A Blogging Pro Responds to the January Empathy Challenge
Guest: Kitty Lusby When Automattic’s John Maeda invited me to evaluate the posts from January’s Empathy Challenge, I was thrilled. As a full-time blogger, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to attract more traffic. Think about it: if nobody reads the stuff I write, then I don’t have a job. Nowadays I’m…
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Daniel W. Robert
Growing An Online Presence: Strategies For More Page Views
You’ve decided to create a blog/website and have gotten fairly decent at publishing content on a regular basis. Congratulations! Like getting into a gym routine that lasts past January, this can actually prove to be a difficult habit to form and stick with – at least in my experience. So what now?
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Erin Casali
A more in-depth look at designers’ portfolios
Just six seconds. This is what is considered the time it takes to recruiters to look at curriculum vitae. Luckily, our hiring team spends far more time evaluating the candidates we get, not just because designers also have a portfolio to present, but also because we want to be sure to hire the best. This…
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Chris Runnells
My plan to build an audience
Blogging isn’t easy, and doing it regularly is hard. I know this because it’s something I’ve struggled with for years (as evidenced by the very sparse archives on my personal site). Even if you post regularly, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually get traffic, which is usually the point of having a web site. The…









