Team meeting: The future of theme design on the theme repo

Note: These are all in note form from the team meetings that took place over 2 days after the WordPress summit. When words like everyone and we are used, they are done for the group that was there. This was a cross section of the people who review and work on this project.

This meeting’s objective was to discuss openly and frankly the state of the theme repo with regards to design and how we can move forward. Not only did we have members of the theme review team, we also had some designers join us.

Discussion:
It’s quite a sad state of design in the org repo.
Fact we have no guidelines to design makes it stay low. It makes it seem like not something to consider.
Depressing to go there.
Few people releasing good solid design free themes. Who care about user experience.
Designers don’t feel can/should comment on tickets.
Design fuzzies are hard to judge.

We can incentivise well thought out experiences. Theme search repo. Future thinking around that.
Nothing should be required, but it should be recommended.
Google page speed and why slow give you actionable things that contribute to your rating. Things you are doing right.
Things are subjective, but we can encourage themes that have well designed widgets.. etc.
Encourage doing right.
No visual bugs.
Could we have make.blog posts that highlight good design? This could be a double-edge sword.

Actions:

  • Weekend in design where we get design team to do blog posts also. Way to adopt a theme. Lets create an event!
  • Create a page called design on handbook. Add resources: color schemes, typography, CPL.
  • Make sure we have it known anyone can add comments to any ticket. Designers can and should be commenting to help.