Once a year, our entire design team gathers in person. While we spend most of the year enjoying the freedom and flexibility of remote, asynchronous work, meetups give us a chance to come together to connect face-to-face, learn, and try new things. This year, designers gathered in Lake Como, Italy; joining from more than 20 different countries.
If you had 70 designers in one place, for one week, what would you create?
When we set out to plan this year’s meetup, we really wanted to cultivate collaborative energy that would carry forward and pay dividends throughout the remainder of the year. Bringing creative minds together is always so much fun, but we hoped the team would end the week feeling like we had only just begun. We wanted designers to see just how much potential there was still to explore together, and how their unique talents could come together to accomplish remarkable things. We felt the best way to accomplish this was to cut out any abstraction and just work on some ambitious projects together.
We took the agenda and penciled in some of the ‘necessaries’- like the kickoff and wrap-up sessions to bookend the week, AMAs with our design leaders, and of course, (delicious) meal breaks. We then reserved the remainder of the agenda for hands-on work.
We divided the design team to work on two topics: building patterns for WordPress, and evolving our design systems. With four days and 30+ designers working on each project, we had ambitious goals for what we could accomplish together.
Pattern making, a creativity multiplier
👉🏻 Block patterns are predefined collections of one or more blocks that you can easily insert into your WordPress posts, pages and block themes. Once you insert a pattern, you can fully customize it with your own content to make it unique. Patterns make it more simple to create complex layouts and designs in any WordPress site without having to start from scratch every time.
A robust library of WordPress patterns helps our users seamlessly create beautiful websites that reflect their unique vision. With guidance from pattern design experts Beatriz Fialho and Rich Tabor, we developed a workshop that demonstrated the importance of patterns, explained the elements of a well-designed pattern, and provided pattern submission guidelines.
Armed with this knowledge (and an eclectic, crowdsourced playlist!), designers got to work, taking on a list of desired patterns we created to guide the workshop. Some of the requested patterns included catalogs, checkout flows, tables of contents, artist portfolios, restaurant menus, and much more. Our team delivered a beautiful, functional, diverse set of new options that we’re working to implement now.
By the end of the week, we created 185 new patterns for the WordPress library and users. This was not only an impressive output, but the synchronous effort also afforded us a unique opportunity to examine and improve the systems and processes we use to work together.
Evolving our products (and our org) through design systems
With many brands under the Automattic umbrella, come many design systems. All at different stages of maturity, with different challenges, and different structures. The meetup provided us with a well-timed moment to come together and evolve them. We sought to mature our internal processes as well as improve the user experience across Automattic’s portfolio of products.
One of the reasons this moment was so timely was due to the recent improvements to the WordPress design system, informed by the admin redesign that our WordPress.org designers and the community have worked on for the past year. For products connected to the WordPress ecosystem like Jetpack and WooCommerce, we used the week to stress-test the new design system and identify additional work to be done. We created a series of prototypes while engaging in lively discussions across teams. This collaboration facilitated conversations about our shared goals to have:
- A vision of the future visual state of our products.
- A more comprehensive and scalable design system to take us to that future.
- Guidelines on how Automattic teams collaborate using this system moving forward.
For Automattic products outside the WordPress ecosystem, we challenged the designers to advance their design systems forward by at least one “level” of maturity. That could mean building a component library if there wasn’t one already, building additional structure into existing libraries, or drafting contribution guidelines, depending on the context. This group still used the WordPress design system as a model but worked together to identify shared themes and issues and develop their own paths forward wherever their products naturally diverged.
Both groups kicked off work and discussions that will continue forward in a cross-team workgroup we call an atelier. After the focused time at the meetup, they have a solid foundation from which to continue working remotely and asynchronously.
Connection: the most important outcome
The real magic of meetups isn’t in the specific projects we do, or the outcomes of that work – the true value is in the time we get to spend connecting with each other. The understanding and trust that we build in person make us better teammates and collaborators when we return home to our solitary offices. We can hear each other’s voices through Slack messages, and empathize with each other more deeply after sharing meals and good conversation.
To that end, we always save some time during meetups to do some fun activities together. This year we were able to enjoy tours of Como, both on foot and by boat, host a cocktail hour in town, send designers out to some smaller, randomized, group dinners, and enjoy a fun wrap party on the last night.
In true Automattic fashion, designers also self-organized a snack swap party and brought treats to share from their home countries, producing a very impressive display of international foods!
As designers, but also as humans, we’re naturally wired to find points of connection and convergence between us. You can hear it happening in real-time at meetups: cultural backgrounds, regional traditions, and language are popular topics- alongside families, travel plans, and our tremendous enthusiasm for the work we get to do. We are so very different and yet delightfully similar. Meetups give us time and space to celebrate both aspects of our talented team.
Until next time! ✌🏽
Photos by Fele La Franca and Andrea Nocifora
Automattic Design