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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Imagining product authoring with WooCommerce and Gutenberg

Alongside the Customizer and the REST API, the other key focus for WordPress in 2017 is improving the tool we use on a daily basis to craft our content - the editor. Content creators are craving a richer, more powerful and more intuitive authoring experience. In response to this, the "Gutenberg" project was formed. Gutenberg …

The Process of Processing with WordPress

I get excited about the little things people build on top of WordPress. All those things like websites, blogs, and ecommerce stores are really cool, but those pieces of software that extend WordPress into realms few of us think about... those are stinking amazing. I especially get excited about data visualization experiments that can reside …

Staying focused by shifting focus.

As designers, we have a single task. Finding a solution to a problem. No matter what discipline of design we work in, the premise is always the same. A problem exists and we need a remedy. But the thing is—problems are sometimes hard… really hard. Depending on the scope of the issue, finding the answer often …

Should designers API?

There's plenty of discussions on the internet about whether or not designers should code, but what about API's? Hear me out. I'm going to tell you about a project I'm working on and how I went from knowing almost nothing about API's to knowing a little more than nothing and along the way, discovered how …