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Alexis Lloyd
Growing design community with the Automattic Design Awards
At the end of 2018, we launched the inaugural edition of the Automattic Design Awards, a program intended to honor the best design work in the WordPress ecosystem. There are beautiful websites built with WordPress, there are plugins and other features that extend the functionality of WordPress in elegant and thoughtful ways. The more we…
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Courtney Burton Doker
The first ATL Design Systems Meetup
Building design systems is hard. What makes it even harder is that a lot of these teams are very small, sometimes even comprising a single person. This can sometimes leave design systems practitioners feeling isolated and overwhelmed. The power of community can help to remove this feeling of isolation, making you feel connected to something…
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David A. Kennedy
Inclusive design: Whose Opportunity Is It?
Maybe you already know the answer to that question, but let me tell you a bit about the journey I’ve taken so I can answer it myself. I’m a twin. Born two-months premature with a number of health challenges early on. I was a small kid who wore thick glasses and had a visible scar…
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erikokawakami
2019 Automattic Commemorative Graphic
I’m from Japan, where New Year is particularly important. It’s a time for observing detailed rituals and customs (exchanging new year cards, eating particular food, going to the shrine or temple), quietly reflecting on the past year, as well as preparing for what is to come in the new year. It’s also the one time…
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John Maeda
2019
The end of 2018 saw our very first “all-distributed” holiday party to help us close out an exciting year working together across all-timezones and working all-remote.
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Filippo Di Trapani
Ethnography is inspiration
A couple of years ago I attended a really fun conference in Whistler, BC about the impact of technology on business and culture. One of the talks really resonated with me and is still pretty fresh in my mind even though I forget who delivered it. The speaker shared how people use ethnographic research to…
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John Maeda
2018 Automattic Design Award Winners Announced
The idea for the Automattic Design Awards was borne out of a desire to honor and grow the fantastic design community within the WordPress ecosystem. We wanted to show how design is thriving in the open-source web, from elegant front-end design to robust tools for creativity. So we’re pleased to announce the finalists and winners!…
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John Maeda
Three Design Principles at Automattic Design
We like to iterate at Automattic, and we had the perfect opportunity to do so IRL at our latest all-company gathering, a.k.a. Grand Meetup. So as we enter into 2019, this is the latest version of our guiding Design Principles reduced from four to three. We make things for people to use, not for the…
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John Maeda
On Small Business Saturday
It took eight years for Amex to achieve what it’s done with “Small Business Saturday” and it’s totally inspiring. Their customizable kit is quite nice and produces a slew of marketing materials including sample email and also Spanish versions of marketing materials, too. In our recent Small Business research work we saw time and time again…
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sntdo
Empathy and Change
It was my daughters 16th birthday and I had spent well over a year planning a surf trip for us to Portugal. I pictured us surfing off into the sunset, eating amazing food, and bonding without inhibitions. The ultimate mother daughter experience. My mother passed away when I was 16 therefore this milestone birthday was…






