Design team monthly recap April, 2018

This is what the Design Team has been focussing on in April 2018:

Weekly meetings

Our weekly meetings occur on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. on these times:

  • Ticket triage Monday’s from 16.30-17.00 UTC
  • Weekly Meeting on Wednesday’s from 17.00-18.00 UTC

The weekly meeting agenda and meeting notes are published on our team page for more detailed insights on our activity.

Inspired by the Marketing team, we want to emphasise that all design work for WordPress is done by volunteers.

Quarterly check-in

By request of @chanthaboune, we drafted a short summary of what the team’s priority, struggles and focus were for Q1 -2018. After much discussion, we distilled our statement down to this: The design team’s top priority for this year is team building, empowering designers to contribute, and we continue to focus on supporting coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. If you want to read what’s behind, follow this link to the Google document we wrote.

Invision

People contributing to the design team, can get an enterprise license for Invision. We now have 31 people with access, and the first prototypes for GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ are there. We’re still figuring out how to actively start using the license amongst WordPress design contributors.

WordPress design team on Invision

Remote design summit

We want to do an online summit for anyone interested in design for WordPress. John Maeda would like to support bringing this together; Tammie Lister walked through some initial ideas for making this happen. The details are still up for discussion, but the basic idea is a summit where anyone can contribute to a specific design goal that the community has agreed on. Join the conversation on our Trello board or add your ideas to our brainstorm document.

Calls for design

We’re actively reaching out to the other teams for calls for design, which resulted in:

  • Lot’s of progress going on on the design for native WordPress plugin headers and icons. Thanks to @cathibosco for breaking this CFD into smaller portions and clarifying what needs to be done.
  • Dhaval is working on #1658-meta which needs UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. to show Events Calendar on make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//meetings page. He asked for design input during our weekly meeting on Slack. However, before jumping into visual design, we need to take one step back. The content is not very findable now. @boemedia noted: “instead of discussing the way it’s presented, I’d say discuss the function and place of the list in the first place.”
  • Dark mode
    Design eyes are requested for the WordPress dark mode plugin, which now is a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party, but in the near future hopefully a core feature. More info on the plugin can be found on either Github or Trac.
  • @melchoyce worked on some mockups for improvement of the menu settings page.
  • Extra props for @cathibosco for being engaged with dashicons and plugin icons and making sure these move forward.
  • @melchoyce created a featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. for GDPR compliance in WordPress, as requested by the Marketing Team.
    GDPR WordPress complian

If you have a call for design, please post it as a comment to our latest meeting agenda, or post a call in our Slack channel 

Ticket triage

On a weekly basis, we go over the oldest tickets that need UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it./UI feedback to catch up. The goal of these is to look at each one and see if we can progress the issue in some way. Tickets that were discussed this month are: #41191, #43484,#23348, #21603, #37600, #37860, #38315, #38304, #36346, #35538, #35887, #34324, #20846, #16185.

Overall improvement of communication and structure

On our about page for make.wordpress.org it says “pixel perfect designer.” We discussed that this term is not very inclusive, and that it would be nice if we could convey “design” a little more broadly, since, besides the visual aspect, there’s also UX. After a short discussion, we decided on just ‘designer’ would do for now. New text is available on make.wordpress.org.

We’ve also extensively discussed where to collect templates, fonts and other assets we can share for work on WordPress. Now some stuff is stored on TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing., but we agreed this is not the best solution. While we’re exploring setting up a repo for design on GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, the filetypes we can upload to our handbook are now zip, psd, ai, sketch and svg. This means we can add assets to the handbook and keep that as a first to go for designers who want to contribute to the project.

To make it easier for new contributors to find out what’s going on, we’ve continued improving our overall structure and communication. This is work in progress. We currently have 3 points of focus: Onboarding, the Handbook and Outreach.