A more in-depth look at designers’ portfolios

Just six seconds. This is what is considered the time it takes to recruiters to look at curriculum vitae. Luckily, our hiring team spends far more time evaluating the candidates we get, not just because designers also have a portfolio to present, but also because we want to be sure to hire the best. This …

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 …

Organization Experiments in Progress

When I started my career in technology I thought the best thing ever was the ability to make things work, so I started learning multiple programming language and building things. I then realized people using my software were having problems, so my next guess was to learn graphic design. Better, but something was still off: …

Remote Workshopping: Facilitating a KJ Technique, Fully Remote

As a designer working in a fully remote team, I often get the question on how certain common design activities happen in remote environment. In some cases, the answer is to just reframe the problem taking a different approach, or to just meet in person when it's needed, but other times we can transition traditional …

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 …

Redesigning legacy navigation for modern times: the Calypso navigation bar

WordPress.com in 2014 had a big problem. It had grown organically over the years across multiple tools and platforms and was periodically influenced with changes coming from the open source community. As a result, it came to have a complicated navigation system across all its pages. One day Shaun Andrews, one of our product designers, …