Recently, the design team I lead was going through a period of low morale. I noticed this through conversations in 1-1s, our team Slack channel, and most notably in our team meetings. The designers were all working on some very big product problems and while the work was really challenging, the rewarding aspect seemed to…

Last week we held our first “Design Collaboration Meetup” connecting across product, dev, support, marketing, and human resources. And of course … design! At the gathering we were able to distribute our new playbooks and connect IRL in super high-bandwidth form compared with how we normally operate as a fully-distributed company. The gathering was opened…

At the end of every week, my boss asks us to write down a lesson we learned. Mine are usually due to a slip up I made. Here’s how it goes: I make a mistake, apologize to the person, and end up saying something along the lines of: “I should have done x, lesson learned…

Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I interview a lot of designers in the course of any given week. Less than half have taken the usual path to becoming a designer. Most took a more meandering route, stumbling upon design through some…

I recently shared a video I created (with the fantastic Caresse Haaser) that explored the spaces of the open web in contrast to the more closed environments that have dominated our recent online experiences. As part of that project, we shared the source materials on GitHub and asked for others to translate the meditation into…

Dave Martin is one of the world’s most experienced distributed designers and design leaders. I first found out about Dave’s work by reading one of his old blog posts where he described the challenges when hiring for an all-distributed design team. Dave left Automattic in 2015 for new adventures, and then three years later came…