hugobaeta-colorexplorationsv09-desktop
Design, Work

Pride and Props

WordPress 3.4 was released today and this is a very exciting release for me as it was the first one I actually appeared in the Core Contributor list for a props I got on a ticket (for helping out with some UX sketches on the theme selector page). Before I was featured as a translation moderator on the Portuguese translation, but this time this has a special feel to it. I’m incredibly proud to be a part of that list!!

I was also super excited when I saw the 3.4 announcement video, produced by the always brilliant Michael Pick, where he used one of my personal art project as a Custom Headers example in the theme customizer!!

Here’s the full video:

Because of this exposure and also because it is Pride month, I thought this was a good opportunity to give away my art piece as a desktop background. This piece is part of a color and lines exploration phase I’m going through in my art. This one is intended to be part of a series, but this is just my first exploration. The final pieces are probably gonna be printed in a large format. But until then, get a high-def desktop background from it here! Also, here’s a preview of what you’ll get:

This, as most of what I do, gets a Creative Commons license:

Creative Commons License Color Explorations v0.1 by Hugo Baeta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Standard
Design, Travel

WordPress in Hawaii, 8-bit at a time

This past week I’ve been in Kailua, Oahu island, in Hawaii on a team meetup (Team Social FTW!). This has been a pretty perfect meetup so far: we have an amazing house right on the beach, the balance of work/fun has been spot on and I’ve had the oportunity of doing some funny creative stuff.

Today, after some days of thinking about this and some teasing from my team-mates to get this done, I’ve built a post-it/pixel version of the WordPress logo! It is based on the 16px WordPress icon version created by Ben Dunkle – I zoomed on it and basically made it so the color of the post-its I had matched loosely the icon. It took me a bit of tweaking and adjusting (thanks J-trip for the help, and Scott “3 part” Berkun for the awesome colorful post-its!), and going back and forth to the beach to look at it from a distance, but I’m super happy with the result!! This was the perfect opportunity to try out some time-lapse recording! Check out the short video I did:

Even thought I’m posting this technically on the 12th, the fact that this was made on the 11th matches perfectly with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg 28th birthday! Happy Birthday Matt! ;)

Standard
Work

2011 State of the Word

Last weekend was WordCamp San Francisco - The annual WordCamp of WordCamps (Meca for WordPress lovers!). In previous years I’ve always attended, but this year I couldn’t make it, unfortunately. It was the biggest WordCamp ever – a success from what I’ve heard and seen (on the live streaming)! Continue reading

Standard
Work

Browse Happy

If you read my previous post about how I became an Automattician, this might be an interesting post – specially if you are looking to apply for Automattic!

So, before going full-time, I had to go through a trial project and I was super excited when I was assigned a redesign of Browse Happy!

Browse Happy was originally created by the Web Standards Project back in 2004, as a way to let convince users to use another web browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Back then IE6 was the market lead and, as we all know, it is a terrible browser to develop for and use.

In 2005 the project was donated to WordPress.

Six years after it was handed over to WordPress, it was about time for a re-alignment in design and in focus, so, a couple of weeks ago the new Browse Happy was launched!

The biggest change, apart from the new design, is that it now advocates users to upgrade their web browser (instead of focusing in trying to get people to get other browser than IE).

This is, as you may guess, a special project for me, as it allowed me to get to where I am. It’s also an interesting coincidence, but since 2005, I’ve always used Browse Happy as a reference on my client websites (if you accessed from an older version of IE, you’d get a message pointing you to it).

It got a lot of attention everywhere, but I was specially proud of it being selected as one of the “Sites we Like” on the Typekit Blog. :D

Browse Happy is going to continue to grow. Several cool features are already planned for it and updates are coming soon! Stay tuned!

Standard
Log

Freshly Pressed

Today was an exciting day!

I just flew back from NYC, where I’ve been hanging out for a week to meet with my team mates (Team Social FTW). After some well deserved sleep, I headed out to Queen of Hearts tattoo parlor for an appointment with my favorite tattoo artist – Pedro Mascarenhas (yeah… flash website… I know…)- to get some fresh ink in me.

Continue reading

Standard