Weekly design meeting notes of Wednesday December 19, 2018

This is the last #design meeting for 2018! The full transcript can be found in our Slack channel. All the links in the text below take you straight to the corresponding conversation 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/..

No meeting scheduled for week 52 of 2018

Please note there’s no meeting scheduled for December 26. We also skip triage on Monday December 24 and December 31. We’ll all come back fully recharged on January 2, 2019.

Trello board

We have a new incoming request from @cathibosco1. She created a Tide team icon, but is unsure where to send assets. @karmatosed suggests getting in touch with the metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team for distribution of the icon to various places.

Topic of the week: projects for 2019

As mentioned in this year’s State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/., these are the nine priorities that we should focus on in 2019, in order to make the biggest impact for WordPress users, in order to make the biggest impact for WordPress users. Many of those will need designers and today’s goal is creating a list of what you wish we could do. For context, read more in the blog post on Design team 2019 thinking.

A lot of ideas, thoughts and suggestions follow this announcement:

  • defining and understanding a vision of how site-building works with 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/
  • potential things that can be done between site customisation and the theme format itself
  • auditing the other areas of the admin dashboard as a start to developing a design system for plugins and themes to work with
  • a focus on admin notices
  • create a better 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 experience
  • encourage learning and making it easier for designers
  • surfacing asset libraries in a common way and making them available for others to be used in various places
  • the role and function of themes in the future
  • a common handbook reference of all the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.’s class names and modifiers to help theme developers…
  • … or extend that idea beyond blocks to common layout patterns and maybe formalize it as a standard library.

Kevin Hoffman shares a list of examples of front-end style guides for inspiration.

If you have any additional ideas, suggestions or thoughts, please add them in the comments of this post.

@karmatosed closes the meeting suggesting to keep the energy of this good conversation alive and continue the next meeting after we’ve hopefully all fuelled up over the holidays.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We hope to see you back in 2019 to work on the great ideas outlined above!