What is in a space designers toolkit?

Star date -304979.5527650938. Space designers are landing on planets, exploring, meeting inhabitants and charting the resources. What do space designers carry in their backpacks? What are the essentials to get the job done that you need when traversing the design universe? The planets? Within Automattic a lot of work is going on right now to …

Seeing humans

This post was meant to be a different one and then yesterday I saw these Tweets by the amazing Mel Choyce : https://twitter.com/melchoyce/status/923249321503576071 I without thinking clicked the ❤️ and liked. It hit me deeper though, it moved me to write this post. In a world of insta-opinions and easy critique, it's pretty hard to …

The benefits of establishing a feedback ritual

For the past few months, my day has started with going through the reviews and support forums for Gutenberg (the new editing experience for WordPress). When I started, I wasn't aware of what benefits this would bring to me. I began out of a need, there were reviews and requests not being answered. The project was …

Receiving the Baton

Not every project you join at the start. I recently was passed the baton to become the new design lead of the WordPress editor focus. The current lead, Joen Asmussen is taking some time off to welcome a new baby boy into his family. He wrote an amazing post about passing the baton, this is …

The importance of triage practice

At Automattic we have the concept of ‘trash pickup’. The idea being you see something that is an issue, you fix that issue. It’s a powerful idea, one that over time adds up to seeing a better experience for everyone. Living this idea for me also means focusing on every detail, even the smallest of …

Designing contributions

I get to work on the team at Automattic that contributes back full time to the wider WordPress.org community. In the WordPress community we get to not just design in pixels, but also design the experience of contributing to the project. Design isn’t just colours and shapes I sometimes think that designing actual contributions in …