kelly.blog

life, work, etc.

Work

  • Design in 2023

    2023 Year in Design

    Highlights from the design team at Automattic. Really proud of all the work we’ve done and everything that is in store for this year! Stay tuned for the video reel.

  • Blue Dot block art

    Designed by George Nelson & Associates in 1960, this art was used on the cover of a brochure introducing customers to “Eames chairs for the office”. Herman Miller is selling the poster, and I thought it would be fun to try and recreate it within WordPress using blocks. Not bad if you view it full size.

  • Designing with WordPress

    Proud of the team for designing tons of amazing themes & countless improvements to WordPress. Love how it all comes together to make the web a more beautiful place. Wild how far we’ve come.

  • Design in Vienna

    This past February, all the designers who work at Automattic were invited to meet up in Vienna, Austria. We hadn’t gotten together as a group since 2019 and there was a bunch of people I hadn’t physically met yet. Was so good to get out of our Zoom squares and Figma chats and into the same room!

  • SotW 2022

    This year’s State of the Word was stunning. Really proud of the design team’s work on this and was happy to have been present for the live event in our NY office space.

  • Reel design

    A highlight reel showcasing some of the great work the design team at Automattic has been working on in the last year. ❤️

  • ggslides.com

    Grandmother & Grandfather always took pictures using slide film and we’d watch them on a projector in their living room – from their travels and just daily life. My cousin scanned 1,500 of them, from the 1960s to the early 2000s. They were scattered across different Google Photos links and I wanted an easy way to look at them and share with others so I created a site: ggslides.com. A few faves:

  • WordPress ♡ Design

    Really excited about all the design work we put into WordPress this past year. Both within the product itself as well as in our external communications, as seen in this video I worked on that highlights all the cool stuff we are about to release. Super proud of the team working on this with me. We’re really just getting started and I’m ready to keep going to make WordPress an intuitive, well-designed experience for all.

  • Cyclocross

    Every year our entire company gets together and one of the things we all have to do is give a four minute talk on any subject. In the past, this has always made me super nervous, and this was the first year that I wasn’t shaking in my boots. Progress!

    The slides aren’t exactly synced up, but if you have ever wanted to learn more about cyclocross or have no idea what it is, your wait is over!

    Two things I want to work on for next time:

    1. Look at the audience instead of the slides
    2. Less “um”s and “yeah”s

  • design.blog

    At Automattic, we have an online design magazine at design.blog. It’s something that our Head of Design, John Maeda created and it has become a joint effort across all the designers and design lovers I work with.

    Every Thursday we publish a new issue, which involves 2-3 articles from design leaders and a brand new homepage created by an Automattic designer. This week, it was my turn! I used the Paper app on the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil to illustrate the cover. It was really fun and actually made me want to get back to my ink and watercolors doodles.

    Design.blog cover:

    design-blog.png

    Individual images:

    wc-34-e1476298866709.png

    coworkingflashtojs

    Press: