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sixhours
The Support Rotation: My Annual Empathy Booster
In addition to doing three weeks of support during our start at Automattic, every employee does an annual support rotation, putting aside their regular jobs for a few hours over the course of the year to join our Happiness Engineers in helping Automattic’s customers. I had the opportunity to do my support rotation at this…
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gareth allison
“I have no idea what I’m doing”
I didn’t go to design school. Truth be told, I fell into this whole design thing by accident.
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James Koster
The risk of homogeny when following positive trends in design
Trends constantly come and go in visual design. Some explode on to the scene and see mass adoption only to fade into obscurity as quickly as they arrived – remember burning text gifs? Others are slow burners that eventually become mainstays once proven to provide a verifiable benefit. Inclusive design is probably the most important…
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raoulw
Intermediate SVG Icons in React
One of the things Product Designers at Automattic get to do plenty of is to tinker with code. Whether it’s prototyping, writing CSS, or even playing with new tools. And that’s what I normally get up to on Hack/Trash Day – our internal day to work on something that’s not you’re regular job – fixing…
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Maria Scarpello
Lessons Learned Teaching Usability Testing with Gutenberg
As you might have read in previous flow posts, last week ended Automattic’s 8th annual Grand Meetup, where 600+ of us made our way up to Whistler, Canada for a week packed full of conversations, meetings, food, drinks, and an endless amount of opportunities to never stop learning. Automatticians have the option to chose to…
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Ola Bodera
From a marathon to a sprint
Developing and launching a theme on WordPress.com is a long, multi-step process that can take weeks, if not months in some cases. We would typically do it all alone, working in relative seclusion, sharing our progress only at certain points. This approach has a few drawbacks — it limits the potential for synergy, it makes…
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Ola Bodera
Cool Designs, and Flow
When I first started in design, I had this morning ritual where I’d go to a few sites that posted “daily design inspirations” (a long scroll of different work) to get into “flow”. What is flow? Flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed…
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Mark
Scrappiness is Happiness
Recently a design colleague suggested to “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Falling in love with the solution is easy because we had everything to do with it — it came from us. But when this happens, it’s difficult to see anything else. Our solution…
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Mel Choyce
Building 10 non-profit sites in 8 hours on WordPress.com
This past weekend, a few of my colleagues and I participated in Out in Tech‘s Digital Corps hackathon in NYC. Along with about fifty other volunteers, we worked to create websites on WordPress.com for ten international organizations fighting to protect LGBTQ+ rights. Because participants were constrained to building sites on WordPress.com, it was a great…
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Gary Murray
Designing for the minority
What do you see? What can’t you see? What does it feel like? Can you see any colors? Is everything just black and white? These are some of the questions I get asked when I tell someone I am color blind, or if they finally figure it out :) Being color blind is something I…
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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