I joined Automattic in 2021 driven by their commitment to open-source, their mission to democratize publishing, and their well-regarded distributed work culture.
During my time in the company, I split my efforts between two divisions: one focused on the open-source WordPress.org project and the other on the WordPress.com platform.
WordPress.org
While working on the open-source project, I contributed to several initiatives, primarily centered around Gutenberg, WordPress’s visual editor.
Beyond these contributions, I was involved in the redesign of WordPress.org, maintained the now-deprecated WordPress Design Library, and created assets for WordPress.org’s social media accounts.
I also played a role in organizing WordCamp Europe 2022 as part of the design team. Before leaving Automattic, I contributed to the development of the new WordPress Design System.
The horizontal structure of Automattic allowed me to collaborate across divisions on a variety of projects. Highlights include:
Thanks to my background as a developer, after a year and half at Automattic, I was invited to join the WordPress.com division to contribute to various developer-focused initiatives.
I worked on projects like these as the main designer:
Staging Sites: This project helped WordPress.com achieve feature parity with its competitors and became a key resource for developers, enabling them to experiment without risking their production environments.
GitHub Deployments: As part of the “Developers, Developers, Developers” initiative I was involved in, this project helped position WordPress.com as a top choice for developers and agencies considering platform options.
Command Palette: This was an exciting project to work on, as it involved creating a tool to streamline navigation between Calypso pages and make action-triggering significantly faster and more convenient.
Design Library: I led the work on the Design Library, which became a go-to reference for designers and developers in our division. During a company-wide design meetup, I co-led a Design Systems session aimed at improving our design libraries across the company. This work eventually led to collaboration with the design systems team and my former WordPress.org division on the creation of the WordPress Design System.
Besides product design and design systems work, I also helped design several landing pages, like the Hosting page, which increased the click-through rate from 18.5% to 40%, making it one of the top-performing pages of 2023.
I also contributed to the Site Profiler, which had a significant impact as well in the company. Previously, users were sent to a third-party site, where we risked losing them. Now, we retained users on our platform, guiding them to purchase domains or host their sites more seamlessly and inside the WordPress.com ecosystem.
Some of the design team folks at Automattic during our Lake Como meetup.
Recognitions and kudos
Some of the kind words I received from my colleagues at Automattic over the years:
In our Hosting Command Palette project, Javier operated effectively in the design role. He was responsive and provided a variety of solutions to consider when we were evaluating UI/UX. Generally speaking, I think everyone enjoys working with Javier and considers him a valued member of the team.
Thank you for jumping into the project tracking document, and making it awesome! With all of your ideas, and contributions, you’re making our squad, and Dotcom Design look better everyday.
Thank you for your creative thinking, care, diligence, and being extremely easy to work with. Your help with the Table Atelier & Dashboard Sync projects has been outstanding.
Thanks for pushing and sharing your chart design evolutions with DataEx. It helps us learn about potential use cases beyond the basics. Seeing the innovative solutions you bring to tough problems is inspiring and motivating.
Thank you so much for taking point on the Design Systems post… and *all* the work that you’ve put into this atelier. Your efforts and knowledge has been critical to our early progress and it is so appreciated!
Javier exceeds my expectations as a Product Designer. The most recent example is Javier being key in the success of the Hosting Command Palette. Javier is super pro-active, not only by contributing to the exploration phase, wireframe, and creating great UX/UI designs, but also by proposing enhancements in the form of GitHub issues for the project. His attention to detail has been fundamental for the success of each project shipped by the YOLO team.
I’m always impressed at how you manage to be both comprehensive and succinct, and your recent drive for icon consistency is a great example. I’m keen to see where it goes!
Javier is always great to work with, give us plenty of lead time where possible (which is a rarity!), gives thoughtful feedback, and always shares useful context with us, which is everything we could ask for with UX and Landing Page copy requests.
