Mel Choyce

  • Design and Exclusion Conference

    Later this month, Automattic is hosting a remote conference on design & exclusion:

    The products we build can perpetuate exclusion and marginalization, often despite our best intentions. On April 21, join a free, online conversation with design and technology leaders about the people and groups that we sometimes exclude, and the need to create products and services that welcome them. Tune in right here.

    I’m helping out with some of the web and design work, along with Kjell Reigstad.

    Keep an eye on https://x.design.blog/ for more info.

    mel

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  • Open Source Design

    This upcoming weekend, I’m presenting at the Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco on The Untold Struggles of Open Source Design. My presentation is based on my experiences as a designer and contributor to WordPress, and goes into issues around attracting and retaining designers, process, and leadership.

    As I work on my presentation, I’m realizing more and more the need to cross-pollinate with other open source communities. WordPress is an older community, but we’ve seen a lot of turnover in the past twelve years. Some of our habits are engrained based on our long history. There’s a lot we can learn, both from more well-established projects and from newer projects.

    So, consider this my public commitment to learn from and share more with other open source design communities. I’ve started by asking around about what communities currently exist. I’ve received a number of replies I hope to look more into:

    https://twitter.com/eli_schiff/status/833430304811601922

    https://twitter.com/mairin/status/833441356836134912

    If you’re a design contributor to another open source project, let’s chat.

    mel

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  • The Social Internet

    Typography, as Postman describes, is in essence much more capable of communicating complex messages that provoke thinking. This means we should write and read more, link more often, and watch less television and fewer videos—and spend less time on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

    — Hossein Derakhshan, Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV

    While I pulled out this specific quote about writing and typography referencing Neil Postman’s work because it resonated with me as a designer and someone who blogs, Derakhshan’s entire piece is a valuable critique of social media and the current state of the internet.

    Derakhshan’s online activism and his blog landed him in an Iranian prison for six years. A notable early blogger, he found the internet after his release a radically different place from the internet he knew before incarceration. He wrote about this (ironically) on Medium in 2014. I remember reading his post then and finding myself tentatively nodding along with with a lot of what he wrote. I’ve just reread it and I find it all the more relevant in a post-2016-election America. Take, for example:

    “Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.”

    Reading that reminds me of the Verge’s recent article, “Facebook and Google make lies as pretty as truth.” All embedded content, for good and increasingly for ill, is treated with the same amount of weight. It’s easy to game. It’s becoming increasingly harder to tell truth from lies, high from low quality, and ads from, for a lack of better words, real content. This is a design problem that as an industry we need to be cognizant of. We need to work towards some sort of solution.

    Reading both of these pieces again, it also reinforces the importance of owning your own content. Just look at Vine. As our freedoms start to wane, the open web becomes all the more important. Start your own blog rather than relying solely on someone else’s platform. Backup regularly. Write frequently.

    I’ll try to write more this year as well.

    H/T John Maeda for sharing.

    mel

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  • Behind the Scenes of Twenty Seventeen

    It’s a wrap! After months of work and over 100 individual contributors, Twenty Seventeen, the new default theme for WordPress, shipped yesterday in WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”:

    WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”

    Twenty Seventeen was the first default WordPress theme I’ve had the pleasure of working on. I wanted to talk a little bit about the design and history of theme, and how we got to where it is now.

    The design that would eventually become Twenty Seventeen went through a couple iterations. At its earliest, it was a one-page restaurant theme that we didn’t feel comfortable tackling yet at Automattic. Once we figured out a good way to do multi-page homepages, I brought it back up and it was suggested I turn it into a business theme. This theme would eventually become Lodestar, a yet-to-be-launched theme on WordPress.com.

    Another couple rounds of iteration to introduce a more interesting grid, sharper typographic system, and the idea of video headers brought us to where Twenty Seventeen is today.

    The coolest part of Twenty Seventeen wasn’t just watching it come to life, it was also watching it work with WordPress core to introduce new features: video headers, starter content, and even edit shortcuts (another feature I worked on alongside the Customizer team). The theme worked well with the release, which was centered around the idea of “your site, your way.” 4.7 is one of the most exciting releases yet, and I’m happy Twenty Seventeen contributed to that.

    Of course, any good default theme also needs a strong team behind it. Working with Laurel Fulford and David Kennedy on the theme has been an absolute pleasure. Laurel coded my designs with accuracy and precision, and was ever patient and gracious in the face of my nitpicking. DK kept us on-track, and made the hard decisions that led us to success. You can read his writeup here:

    https://davidakennedy.com/2016/12/07/dear-twenty-seventeen-contributors/

    I’m thankful for all 103 contributors who helped create Twenty Seventeen:

    aaroncampbell, acmethemes, adammacias, afercia, ahortin, akshayvinchurkar, alex27, allancole, anilbasnet, b-07, binarymoon, bradyvercher, brainstormforce, caspie, celloexpressions, claudiosanches, clorith, davidakennedy, davidmosterd, delawski, dimadin, dineshc, doughamlin, electricfeet, enodekciw, fencer04, for, grapplerulrich, hardeepasrani, helen, hiddenpearls, idealien, imnok, implenton, implenton, initial, iv, joefusco, joemcgill, johnpgreen, jordesign, joshcummingsdesign, joyously, juanfra, karmatosed, laurelfulford, leobaiano, littlebigthing, lukecavanagh, mageshp, mahesh901122, manishsongirkar36, mapk, mattwiebe, mbelchev, metodiew, mor10, mrahmadawais, netweb, nikschavan, nnaimov, noplanman, nukaga, ocean90, odysseygate, patch, patilvikasj, peterwilsoncc, pratikchaskar, pressionate, presskopp, rabmalin, ranh, rianrietveld, ryelle, sami, samikeijonen, sandesh055, sgr33n, sirbrillig, sixhours, smyoon315, snacking, soean, sstoqnov, swapnilld, swisspidy, swissspidy, taggon, tg29359, themeshaper, transl8or, tsl143, tywayne, valeriutihai, voldemortensen, vrundakansara, westonruter, williampatton, yoavf, yogasukma, and zodiac1978.

    All you folks were a pleasure to work with. We made a pretty dang nice default theme, if I do say so myself.

    mel

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  • Design Feedback

    As some of you probably know, I’m a design contributor for WordPress. Lately, I’ve been working on Twenty Seventeen, the latest default theme. It’ll be released this December with WordPress 4.7.

    A topic I wanted to bring up early in the public process for making Twenty Seventeen was design feedback. Designers, either through art school (which I didn’t go to), or working with other designers on teams, or even open source contributing, need to learn how to give and receive feedback. Most other people don’t have to learn this skill to succeed at their jobs. However, anyone can learn how to give good design feedback, even if you aren’t a designer. In fact, I believe it’s a good skill for anyone working in product design to learn. If you’re an agency designer, it’s also a good skill to teach your clients.

    Here’s how I think good design feedback should be structured:

    • Empathize. Remember that behind every design is a person. If you wouldn’t say it to this person’s face, don’t say it on the internet.
    • Start with “I think
” and finish with “because
”.
    • Comment on particular elements that don’t work in the design, like the typography, colors, hierarchy, and composition. Try to be as specific as possible.
    • Stick to goal-oriented feedback: “This theme can become a better default theme for more users if it did [x], [y], and [z].”
    • Frame feedback as suggestions, not mandates. “What if you
” and “How about if you tried
” are great ways to present alternate ideas to a designer.

    Twenty Seventeen’s been going swell and we’ve had a lot of great contributions and feedback from the community. Thanks to everyone who’s left a comment, or made a GitHub issue, and helped keep the process positive. :)

    mel

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  • Attending CSSConf

    Earlier this week I attended CSSConf in Boston, the city where I conveniently happen to live. :)

    This was my first CSSConf, and it had a very different vibe than the other conferences I’ve attended lately. Unlike An Event Apart, it was a smaller, intimate conference — but unlike a WordCamp, it focused with just one track both days. In general, I’m a big fan of one-track conferences. They feel more curated and eliminate the need to debate between different talks or speakers.

    Throughout the conference, there was some division amongst speakers about the nature of CSS, which I feel like narrows down into “fuck the cascade” / “embrace the cascade,” with programmers on one side and front-end devs on the other. As a designer, I find myself in the embrace camp.

    Some of my favorite talks of the conference were Will Boyd’s Silky Smooth Animation with CSS, Sara Soueidan’s SVG IRL (which ended up being more along the lines of “embrace hacks when you have to,” with lots of different tips and tricks from a recent project she’s been working on), Justin McDowell’s Bauhaus in the Browser (my top fave!), and Alisha Ramos’ Coding is a Privilege.

    The videos are already starting to go up online:

    Thanks to all the organizers and speakers for a great conference!

    mel

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  • Say Hello to Twenty Seventeen ??

    It’s that time again: time to build a new default theme for WordPress! WordPress 4.7 will launch with a brand new theme – Twenty Seventeen. Designed by Mel Choyce (@melchoyce), Twenty Seventeen sports a modern look and will make a good base for any business website or product showcase.

    — Say Hello to Twenty Seventeen ?? – Make WordPress Core

    More to come at the end of the cycle, where I’ll talk about the whole process behind the theme, but for now I wanted to announce that I’m working on Twenty Seventeen, next year’s default WordPress theme. ?

    Check out the post for more details, and key an eye out for my full write-up once WordPress 4.7 is released later this year!

    mel

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  • Designers and Chefs

    “Rules? There are no rules. Do whatever you want.”

    — Grant Achatz, A Chef’s Table (2×01)

    In a recent newsletter, Tobias van Schneider talked about his fascination with chefs. While designers get pushed towards management as their careers progress, chefs continue cooking. They don’t put down their knives when they run a restaurant; they continue to create and innovate and push boundaries. It’s something many designers aspire to, but rarely accomplish.

    I’m also fascinated and inspired by chefs. I love food and I love eating. I love cooking, too, though my skills there are average. When I watch documentaries about chefs (I’ve recently been enjoying season 2 of Chef’s Table) I see a lot of parallels between cooking and designing. Maybe it’s because both are “craft” fields. We’re both creative; we both make. When I listen to Grant Achatz, Dan Barber, Ed Lee, and April Bloomfield talk about cooking, I’m reminded of designers in similar positions: Eric Meyer, Frank Chimero, John Maeda… I see in them a kind of creative thinking I aspire to achieve. Their journeys resonate.

    People have been cooking for the whole of human history. Somehow, we’re still discovering new flavor combinations, new dishes, new techniques for cooking. There’s always more room for experimentation and innovation.

    Web design has been around for what — 25 years? It’s younger than I am (what a weird thought). It builds upon a hundred years of graphic design, hundreds more years of printing, but as a whole feels like a young field. (Maybe that’s just my inadequate grasp on art history. Guess I should have taken a class in college.) Our medium is always evolving. What I’m designing now might not even be relevant in a couple years, when we move on to new interfaces. Digital design is a moving target, and that makes it super exciting.

    mel

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  • Bias in Design

    Designers can get lost thinking ‘this is what I would do in this situation.’ But we are biased and need to always open ourselves to other perspectives in order to do our best work.

    — Designing Gaming for Everyone

    Great article on how Microsoft is working to make gaming more accessible. I especially love that they brought in gamers with various degrees of hearing and verbal abilities as subject matter experts.

    As designers, we should always be challenging our own biases and assumptions. That means testing our products with the people who will be using them, gathering feedback, and constantly iterating. That means listening, first and foremost.

    h/t Kelly for sharing.

    mel

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  • ADHD anti-patterns on the web

    I’ve spent most of my life ignoring my untreated ADHD. Instead, I’ve devised personal hacks to work around it, such as:

    • Excessive caffeine consumption
    • Picking classes which highlight my skills
    • Gravitating towards a career that is compatible with my work habits
    • Etc.

    My girlfriend was diagnosed with Autism earlier this year. I started learning more about Autism and the neurodiversity movement. That helped me explore my own neurodivergence; I thought more about how my ADHD effects me.

    I have a lot of trouble reading (rather unfortunately — it’s one of my favorite hobbies). I lose focus easily. I lose my place. I find myself rereading the same sentences over and over again. I’ll get down to the end of a paragraph and realize I didn’t absorb anything. Usually I can push my way through, but reading on the web is full of distractions that break my attention. Paying attention to my symptoms helped me identify web patterns which inhibit my ability to process information.

    Here are two patterns I find particularly difficult:

    Collapsible headers

    You know the kind: sticky headers that collapse upwards when you pause a page, or scroll down and read. But the second you start moving upward, they leap back into place. Designed to increase focus, this pattern instead jolts me out of whatever I’m reading. It often covers the content I scrolled back up to re-read. I find this particularly difficult to handle on Medium, especially on my phone or tablet. If you’re logged out, there are currently two bars that appears when you scroll upwards.

    While reading, I often find myself having to go back and re-read a previous sentence to absorb the message. For me, collapsible headers reduce my focus, not enhance it.

    Animation

    Animation is distracting. Please use it with intention.

    If there is something animating on the page, that is all I can focus on. I can’t keep my eyes from moving along with it. Sometimes an animation or gif is so distracting I have to hide it with my hand.

    I can deal with animation when it’s an integral part of the article itself — for example, if I’m reading a post on animation techniques — but when animation is decorative or superfluous, it hinders my ability to read. (Worst of all are animated ads stuck in the middle of articles.)

    If your site uses these two patterns, ask yourself: does it improve the user experience? Or is my content harder to engage with now?

    Just food for thought.

    mel

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