Embracing web-safe fonts

Before webfonts were widely available, designers relied on a relatively small number of web-safe fonts, i.e. fonts that come pre-installed with various operating systems, and thus most likely to be present on user’s devices. As a result the web was saturated with Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia and Times New Roman. While these fonts are not …

Communicate with Silent Movies

It can be hard to describe a visual idea with words. Thats why photos exist. But sometimes even a picture doesn’t get the job done. Thats why GIFs exist.

One more thing…

I have a guilty pleasure. On a Sunday afternoon when the weather is bad I like nothing more than to sit down to an episode of Columbo. My wife and I have the entire box set and have made our way though every episode, including the pilots of Mrs Columbo. Watching a random episode is …

Typographic Tweaks for Longreads

During the 7 years I've been involved with Longreads, we've gone from sharing links on Twitter to publishing our own in-depth, investigative stories. While we've grown substantially in scope and focus, the brand has largely stayed consistent. The core of the Longreads brand has always been simple, traditional typography, paired with a healthy amount of whitespace. I've made small …

WordPress as a Solid Foundation for Applications

Usually, people associate WordPress with a blogging platform. It’s true, but WordPress has evolved to much more than that. As part of its evolution, WordPress has received several additions and built-in features that can be used when building Web applications, such as content sanitization, validation, caching, transients, and many more. Let’s go through some of …

Balancing Options vs. Overload

On WordPress.com, one thing we’ve been focusing on is making themes that just work. It’s a bit of a balancing act; it’s very tempting to allow customers to control every aspect of their theme, because it seems like the simplest way to give them what they want. That idea may sound great to customers, but …

Thoughts on Compiled CSS Files in Git

An ongoing discussion about build tools in the Underscores GitHub repository reminded me of something that seems to come up a few times of over the life span of a project. CSS preprocessors, the best known being Sass and Less, have become essential resources that make managing complex stylesheets much easier. A common issue when …

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 …

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 …

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 …