Getting your hands dirty

I've always been driven by the desire to make things. As a child, I spent a lot of my time writing and illustrating terrible books (mostly about princesses named Sarah who rode around on pet elephants) and building my little sister's LEGO sets (she'd let me to build them for her if I'd play with …

Resetting to create

I like to think I'm organised. I try to have my calendar as up to speed as possible and scheduled everything that involves interacting with other people. I keep my to-do list as updated as possible. I use a habits app to track things that I want to do everyday (eating well, meditating, reading, etc.), …

Designing Your Remote “Office”

Photo credit: Matteo Vistocco “So, where do your designers sit?” I was at a lunch table during a design leadership conference late last year, chatting with other leaders in the industry. This question left me...confused. I finally realized what we were talking about and laughed. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career working remotely. Figuring …

Running an effective remote design team

Around this time last year, I got an interesting call on Slack. Automattic had recently organized its mobile teams into a new division called Hogwarts, and our new division lead Cate Huston had embraced her new identity. I was coming off of several weeks of time off after surgery to repair a nerve in my …

Why creating a child theme might be a bad idea

Over the last few months, we have been refreshing a bunch of themes, the latest one being Radcliffe 2. A couple of weeks ago I was tasked to refresh an old photo blog theme on mine: Cubic. I built this theme as a child theme from Boardwalk as I wanted them to share a similar …

Get Your Theme Ready for Gutenberg

Gutenberg is the codename for the upcoming WordPress editor. It’s currently in beta and available for download from the WordPress.org plugin repository. The new editor consists of blocks that replace current hacky methods of introducing dynamic content such as widgets, custom HTML, and shortcodes. If you test your current theme with Gutenberg, you’ll notice that …

The Perception of Presence in Remote Teams

I often get many kinds of questions regarding remote work, often from an organizational and structural perspective. Recently however I've been asked a different one: "I'm a freelance about to start working remotely for a remote company, do you have any advice for me?". On the surface it looks like a simple question, with the …