Rich Tabor

Multidisciplinary maker specializing in the intersection of product, design and engineering. Making WordPress.

All Topics advice ai annual review blocks design gutenberg learning patterns personal product themes travel wordpress

  • Tiny details

    Like the nuanced brushstrokes of a painting or the delicate notes of a melody, tiny details often go unnoticed, yet they play a key role in profoundly shaping creative outcomes.

    In the realm of design and product, these tiny details are essential catalysts for curating thoughtful experiences.

    Subtle animations, uniform copy, cohesive design metrics, and harmonious micro-interactions all come together seamlessly to level-up an application into a delightful user experience.

    You might not see tiny details, but you certainly feel them.

    Tiny details are not just embellishments; they are the cornerstone of design. And it’s in these seemingly insignificant tiny details that we transform mediocrity into excellence.

    Such attentiveness to detail is absolutely vital, as the antithesis of tiny details is carelessness—which leads to outcomes that feel unfinished and unintuitive.

    So, sweat the tiny details; they matter more than you think.

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  • Behind the scenes of Twenty Twenty-Four

    I had the pleasure of working with so many great folks to bring the Twenty Twenty-Four default WordPress theme to fruition.

    In this post shared on automattic.design, I chatted with designer Beatriz Fialho and code wrangler Maggie Cabrera on how Twenty Twenty-Four was designed and engineered to be the most best out-of-the-box WordPress experience to date.

    Introducing the Twenty Twenty-Four theme automattic.design ↗

  • Colorways

    Consistency. That’s the name of the game when it comes to designing a website. And having a way to design, and apply, like-styling to whole sets of blocks is a huge step towards publishing pages with consistency and speed.

    So I explored an idea I’m calling Colorways — a “simple mode” for stylizing page content. You design a few “mini themes” essentially, where background, heading, text, and button colors are established. This would happen within the custom theme.json object (for now), providing a group of CSS variables for applying styles to these groups of blocks.

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  • WordPress as a design tool

    Last week I challenged myself to take one pattern, from one theme, and morph it multiple times—only using the design controls block editor. It’s kind of like CSS Zen Garden, but without CSS—just out-of-the-box WordPress design tooling. 

    One theme. One pattern. Seven ways.

    No additional blocks, nor custom CSS between scenes—just designing in the good ol’ WordPress block editor.

    WordPress as a design tool richtabor.com

  • Fluid typography and block themes

    Last year I shared a piece on fluid typography, in particular on adopting a fluid type scale within WordPress block themes, using the CSS clamp() function. The method I experimented with is interesting in that it uses a type scale, then calculates the fluid type values for each font size within the theme’s theme.json file.

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  • Introducing Wei, my newest WordPress theme

    Introducing Wei. Tell your story and share your thoughts with a minimal WordPress block theme, inspired by pure simplicity. Embracing clean type, beautifully bold color schemes, and color-matched featured images, Wei puts your words first — in a delightful and creative fashion. 

    Wei is a stripped down, minimalistic block theme with a single column layout. It gives a lot, and asks for little in return.

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  • WordPress theme style variations

    Style variations are a new feature of block themes, recently landing in WordPress 6.0. They’re just one part of the new era of WordPress theming that we’re looking at, with the introduction of Full Site Editing. These style variations are alternate design pre-sets for a theme, enabling you to quickly apply a new look and feel to your site—all within a single theme. Too good to be true? Actually, no. 

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  • A new era of WordPress themes

    We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg. What we didn’t know, was by how much.

    With the arrival of the anticipated Full Site Editing experience into WordPress 5.9, themes are starting to look very different.

    This new class of block-based WordPress themes arguably introduces the biggest change to themes, since well… themes existed. These themes are built entirely with blocks. That is, the headers, footers, blogroll, and page templates — literally every aspect of the theme. If it’s on the page, it’s a block.

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  • Introducing Wabi, a new theme

    Share your authentic self with Wabi, a WordPress block theme designed to help you tell your story best. Wabi foregrounds the simplistic design language of storytelling through clean lines, beautiful typography and a dynamic accent color system — making it a brilliant theme for writers and publishers.

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  • Exploring generative art

    TLDR; I built a generative art flow that is fully autonomous: generating art daily from creative code, and publishing to Instagram and WordPress without any humans. Cool, eh?

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