Design

Design in (and with) WordPress.

Million dollar products

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Brian Krogsgard
Kyle Neath isn't a fan of Unicorn culture in tech-land. He would like to see more people aim to create what he qualifies as family businesses, and aim for smaller (more niche) customer bases, provide better service, build companies that…

Twenty Sixteen gives me a bit of a sour taste

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Brian Krogsgard
Of course we all expected a new default theme soon enough, as the naming scheme demands; I had my money that it would be part of 4.5 early next year. It was announced yesterday with a design proposal complete, and will likely go into…

Doing what I want after 25 years

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Brian Krogsgard
The latest HeroPress essay is by Becky Davis, who describes how she got into web design and development with WordPress after 25 years of doing things for other people and their needs. She finally asked herself what she wanted, went…

WordPress 4.3, “Billie”, released

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Brian Krogsgard
WordPress 4.3, "Billie", has been released. Billie includes four major user-facing features that most website owners will experience on a semi-regular basis, and many other enhancements, bug fixes, and developer features.

Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress

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Brian Krogsgard
Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg have hardly communicated with one another in the last five years, but they are ideological enemies. They have very strong personalities and unshakable beliefs on business and software. This is a story of their dispute, their idealism, and the implications it will have on the WordPress project.

Pearson versus Mullenweg, a history

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Brian Krogsgard
This is a preview of the first part of my upcoming article on Thesis, Automattic, and WordPress. Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg have hardly communicated with one another in the last five years, but they are ideological enemies. They are…

Design before discovery

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Brian Krogsgard
Guillermo Rauch has written a post about the development of the new VideoPress, titled Pure UI. In it, he describes the workflow for creating the new player and how it was managed between design and development. He says that the…

Things learned building and coding HTML emails

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Brian Krogsgard
Now, don't everybody click at once, as I know it will be tempting. But this article is all about stuff Lee Munroe has learned about building HTML emails. Let me put it this way: making email templates suuuuucks. If you've…

Moving Dashicons from an icon font to SVG

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Brian Krogsgard
Mel Choyce has started the conversation on Make Core to change WordPress's Dashicons icon font to SVG: In the next couple months, we’re going to focus on converting the Dashicons icon font in core to SVG. The process of adding and…

Dealing with ROT content

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Brian Krogsgard
A lot of big websites have ROT (Redundant, out-of-date, trivial) content, and it can make maintaining and improving websites incredibly difficult. If you've ever worked on a website with a few thousand pages you know what I mean; but the…

Theme team roadmap and surveys

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Brian Krogsgard
Tammie Lister has created a roadmap for the theme review team, with steps she thinks they can take forward. It's been a tenuous time for the team, and Tammie's roadmap is excellent, I think. She's proposing five areas for consideration:…

UI and password initiatives for WordPress 4.3

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Brian Krogsgard
Two of the initiatives for WordPress 4.3  are for further improving WordPress (especially mobile) UI and re-evaluating password management. Starting Thursday, lead developer Helen Housandí will host UI chats in the WordPress Slack #design channel. Additionally, lead developer Mark Jaquith further laid…

How to create better, more accessible WordPress themes

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Sami Keijonen
Accessibility is an important part of modern web development. It is our responsibility as creators of WordPress themes to make them accessible to all users, on any device. In this article, I'll offer some simple tips to create better, more accessible WordPress themes.

Advantages of ems and rems over pixels

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Brian Krogsgard
I've long preferred a mix of ems rems (and percentages for that matter) over pixels in web design and front-end development. However, some of the original reasons have gone away as browsers have gotten smarter. Yet, Vasilis van Gemert has collected…

Where style guides fit process

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Brian Krogsgard
If you've ever worked on a site that evolves over time or for one that has pre-existing brand guidelines, then you probably know a bit about style guides. Chris Coyier has kindly named some common style guide strategies, and talked…

WordPress showcase: Politico for Europe

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Brian Krogsgard
Politico.eu just launched. Politico is a big political news outlet here in the United States, and their push to European politics is a major initiative for them. And they're making the push using WordPress as their CMS. I was surprised…
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