As WordPress celebrates its twenty years, I’m delighted to share some valuable insights and reflect on this remarkable period that led me to both professional and personal growth.
“I never thought WordPress was a suitable tool for visual designers. Now I can’t live without it”. How about such a sincere disclaimer to start a praising argument on something?
In fact, the few times I conducted projects without any help from developers (and their magic), I was disappointed by the final results. I’ve always been aware of the WordPress community and their winning professional websites, but I always thought that universe was too far from me, my knowledge, and my skills.
It all started to change during the pandemic when I was looking for companies that appreciate distributed work not circumstantially but permanently, and after months of search, I got an invitation for a trial project at Automattic. During the experience, I began to understand and admire the culture behind the company and joined them to help build the tool I always wanted.
Write more, design better
Since the initial interactions, I found out how important it was to register and to communicate with folks here through writing. Right after joining, I delved into the depths of the Field Guide, just to fall in love with the effort put into documenting at Automattic.
No more long-lasting calls or email threads asking for help. With the extensive documentation created by Automatticians, I discovered that knowledge is meant to be preserved and easily accessible. This helps newcomers, encourages sharing, and stimulates cooperative work, whether you’re inside or part of the community. It acts as a precious lifesaver, a commitment that is definitely worth the invested time.
During onboarding, I discovered Automattic’s impressive Creed. These wise words taught me how to face daily tasks and initiate my journey. I was inspired to empathize with our customers, and I became a heavy user of the WordPress Editor. I built themes quickly with my nascent knowledge and document suggestions to make my bolder ideas possible.
Plan, iterate, or pivot (but keep moving forward)
My days quickly became a cycle of creative construction, taking crafted Figma layouts into block-based designs. Assigned to a small team of awesome designers, we have been experimenting with features throughout WordPress, bug reporting, and hoping to showcase that our product can and should be attractive to designers like the old me.
But things move fast at Automattic, and after my first semester, we were invited to change our creative process and engage in a challenging way of designing themes—skipping Figma and embracing the WordPress Editor as our base design tool. We were challenged to deliver a couple of new theme ideas each week. As mentioned in the Creed, I know there’s no such thing as a status quo, but I must confess I was concerned.
After clarifying expectations with our lead and the Design Council, we set priorities as a team and actively supported one another daily. This bond between us gave us the strength to keep calm and carry on with the challenge. While topics like the spark conversation, I congratulate Pablo Honey and Matias Ventura for anticipating it a semester ago.
Today, we are assisting the Themes Dev team in implementing a tool called Theme Launcher, which was created to support designers in launching their themes.
With all that, I happily acknowledge the successful ideas we have created so far. I am looking forward to all the great releases still to come.
Trust our awesome team (and celebrate)
Everything is constantly changing at Automattic. When I think about the work we do today, I’m confident that we will continue to iterate and improve each day. When it comes to executing what is done here, I can’t think of better professionals.
Some folks have been around for years, even decades. Others joined in the last three years of indisputable growth. And there is also a whole team of freshmen like myself. Yet I detect in everyone the kindness to feel one another’s pains. I met a lot of teammates at a Design meetup we had in February in Vienna. It was simply outstanding. During our time together, besides working on our professional tasks, I had the opportunity to meet these incredible individuals during coffee breaks, meals, and hangouts.
Resourceful people coming from diverse backgrounds and sharing their vision in a true celebration of creativity! It made me proud to be here — precisely the kind of experience every professional looks for in a design position. I truly believe that, even though we have excellent products, people are ultimately the most valuable resource at Automattic.
In the past two semesters, I learned a lot. I learned to trust processes and to explore the collaborative essence that transformed an open-source platform into a successful business. I learned to support and to be supported whenever necessary. And finally, I learned that being an Automattician is to wake every day and join a marathon that started two decades ago, keeping up with the delightful mission of planning the course ahead.
I am confident that this winning culture will thrive with or without me. But since I am fortunate enough to be part of it, I am embracing the noble journey of making the web a better place every day. Thank you all for the opportunity!