• 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.

  • 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.

  • WordPress 3.9 “Smith” released today

    WordPress 3.9 “Smith” was launched this afternoon. It’s the fifth release I’ve contributed to. The cycle focused a lot on improving the content and media editing experience within the WordPress admin, along with adding a redesigned theme browser for installing new themes, and a new way to add widgets to your site via the Customizer. (Post Status has a nice recap of the user-facing features) It was an incredibly feature-rich release that I’ve personally been looking forward to for a while.

    Along with 266 other contributors this cycle, I:

    • Worked on refining the design of the playlist settings panel
    • Helped Gregory Cornelius and Andrew Ozz with the UI and UX around the various gallery and image editing improvements
    • Helped redesign a lot of the various TinyMCE modals along with Janneke Van Dorpe and Andrew Ozz
    • Along with Ben Dunkle, added a ton of new icons to Dashicons, the WordPress admin icon font, including an entire suite of of media icons to replace the old “crystal” icon set
    • Designed the 3.9 “About” page along with Kelly Dwan
    • Designed the 3.9 release post on WordPress.org

    You can see all of the new icons we’ve added to Dashicons during this release, and check out the 3.9 release post here.

    Thanks to all of the contributors this cycle, especially the release leads Andrew Nacin and Mike Schroder, and feature developers Andrew Ozz, Gregory Cornelius, and Scott Taylor. 3.9 was a good one. :)