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Jeff Golenski
Filling in the Cracks: The Road to Better Brand Perception
I was born and raised within a rural town in New England. A place where public transit is virtually nonexistent and the primary mode of transportation is via automobiles. Traveling to the nearest grocery market, one finds themselves on a short pilgrimage— driving down long windy country roads whose sides are lined with trees and tall…
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Ola Bodera
Reflections on theme retirements
For the past few weeks I’ve been gradually retiring themes from the WordPress.com showcase. Retirement may sound a bit dramatic, but it simply means a theme will be removed from our offerings, and new customers won’t be able to activate it on their sites. This way we can keep our theme collection fresh and make sure…
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Dan Hauk
Sending the right message with form validation
Error messages. Those little things everyone hates to see. As designers, we like to design the best possible experience for getting users through the task at hand. But it’s our job to put as much consideration into error states as we do the success flow. Any error messages we show to users should provide helpful…
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David A. Kennedy
The Next Chapter for Themes
Every few months I read a post about how the WordPress theme business has shrunk. The authors always reach a similar conclusion. Sales have dwindled. Competition has increased. Putting food on the table, finding a niche and standing out is near impossible. It may not be so impossible though. With a new editing interface on…
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Kjell Reigstad
Hundreds of Tiny Arrows
I recently hand-drew hundreds of tiny arrows for a Longreads illustration. It took about four hours, with a few breaks to check Slack and refill my chai. I knew I could have drawn a few arrows and duplicated them in Photoshop. I would’ve added some brush strokes to differentiate them from each other, and it…
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Filipe Varela
Fidelity matters
When trying to communicate a design idea in a work environment, it is essential that you do so in the most effective way possible for all parties involved. You want to be as clear and as purposeful as possible, and make sure the delivered message lends itself to meaningful feedback and action. How you communicate…
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Shaun Andrews
Rapid Prototyping
A large group of designers at Automattic use Sketch for their work. It’s a great design tool, and with the addition of symbols it’s become super powerful. We’ve got a few internal symbol libraries, and each designer likely has a version of their own. Here’s a quick screenshot of the symbols from a recent Sketch…
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Michael Arestad
Improving the WordPress experience
The experience of creating a WordPress site can vary wildly. Occasionally, I hear how someone set it up without any major roadblocks. I more often witness nightmare-level setup experiences. Together, with help from the community and hosts, we’re working to improve the process of building a WordPress site. The fractured flow of the past and…
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Erin Casali
Can positive feedback be used in place of negative feedback?
Feedback is difficult, especially because we don’t take it as a skill to be learned but we expect everyone to be already good at that. Even more, when we say feedback we often refer to negative feedback only. This is misleading because it doesn’t just ignore positive feedback, but also assumes that it’s the right…
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Joen A.
Learn Something Difficult
Back in the day, I designed Flash websites. I was pretty good at it too, and it netted me a job as a Flash animator and designer at a small Copenhagen based studio. We made really cool things, some of them are probably still around. As time went on, though, the shortcomings of Flash became…
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