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Smashing Podcast Episode 56 With Veerle Pieters: How Has The Design Industry Changed?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast we ask how has the design industry changed? Is technology making our work easier? Vitaly Friedman talks to veteran designer Veerle Pieters to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: She’s a graphic and web designer who founded a graphic and web design studio with her wonderful, wonderful partner, Geert. She was born on the Belgian coast near Bruges — oh, I would love to go back to Bruges — and now lives in Deinze, a city in London with 45,000 inhabitants. From an early age, she immersed herself into drawing and love of illustration has kept her going for more than three decades now. And she’s been designing logos, stationary, brochures, books, websites, and applications since then. She has worked with Facebook, Google, Greenpeace, Adobe, the Library of Congress, and so many other small and large companies and organizations. Most importantly, she chooses her project based on how well she connects with the company, all people working there.

Vitaly: She’s also a firm believer in the power of sharing, which is exactly what she has been doing in her wonderful tutorials, articles, and inspiration feed since 2003. Now, when not designing, she loves listening to soulful deep house music and present her bicycle, and there are plenty of photos proving that this is indeed true. So, we know she’s a wonderful designer and illustrator, but did you know that being a Belgian, she, of course, loves Belgian chocolate, but also Swiss typography and Swiss graphic design. My smashing friends, please welcome Veerle Pieters. Hello Veerle. How are you doing today?

Veerle: Hi, Vitaly. I’m doing smashingly good.

Vitaly: That’s wonderful to hear. I mean, I know you... I don’t know, I remember vividly this moment, I don’t know, it feels like maybe 15 years ago or so when you were posting a lot of articles on your blog about CSS and design and CSS tutorials and all these things.

Veerle: Yeah.

Vitaly: I need to hear your story. I need to know-

Veerle: Where’s the time?

Vitaly: Yes. I mean, I know that you always had a lot of interest in art and drawings and design, but I’m wondering, how did you then come to this workplace? And what excited you about it back then? Why?

Veerle: So, not sure. I should maybe start at the very beginning. I started as a freelance designer, so that was still the early nineties back then, so no internet yet. But the first five years, I tried to make my way in designing for small agencies, ad agencies, doing print work and trying... Yeah, it was right from school actually, which was hard. But then in ’97... So the first five years, I really struggled. And I actually didn’t make any money, but I didn’t give up. I was at the point, should I look for a full-time job or not? But I kind of stick to it. I met Geert then, and actually, when the web was coming, we were kind of interested in it because I remember with my Macintosh back then, I had trouble. And not that I had always trouble, but there was a moment that I had trouble with my printer. And the guy, the technician came and he said, “I’m going to look for if there’s an update and the driver from the print driver.” And he was always mentioning, “Yeah, we can download it from the internet.”

I was like, huh, on the internet, that’s interesting. Because afterwards, I saw the invoice and I was like, it cost me a lot. If I have trouble again, I should look into having an internet subscription. So, that’s how I started looking into what’s the internet? And then it was still text and not graphic. But then all of a sudden, things evolved. There was Netscape coming out, and all of a sudden you could have images in webpages and they became more and more graphically, the pages. So, I was interested in how do they create such page. So, I was looking at... There were basic tools. I remember Bare Bones BBEdit. That was one of the-

Vitaly: Yeah. Wow, this brings back memories, I have to say.

Veerle: Yeah. And there was another little tool I was thinking. Was it from... It was visually. Page. It’s something with page.

Vitaly: Oh, I don’t remember anymore, but I know exactly the kind of tool that you’re talking about.

Veerle: If it’s from Adobe, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I looked into how a page was created, and I remember that it motivated me. Maybe this is the future. If it becomes more graphically, it can become your job.

Vitaly: Right. But you never abandoned print, right? You never really said, okay, I’m not going to do print anymore. I’m just going all web. So, you were doing mixture of both, so you might have some project which you can kind of-

Veerle: Always.

Vitaly: ... partly print and partly digital?

Veerle: Yes. Yes. And also, at that time, I remember there was... Well, a bit later, you had Flash from Macromedia Flash. That was becoming popular. And actually, a little bit before that, you have Macromedia director to create CD-ROMs. I’ve had a couple of projects in that direction as well, which were really big challenges because it needed a lot of testing, Mac and Windows. It was rather technical. I remember we worked also with a freelancer back then, a very good freelancer who knew the scripting a lot of, because it was a lot of coding work as well to create such a CD-ROMs. And with Flash, we also made, not purely for the web actually, but a lot of presentations for ad agencies. Flash-

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: ... a bit of the new... Back then, it was the more graphical PowerPoint thing, but more really, well, presentations. We did that as well.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: So, it was always a mixture of everything together, interactive and print. Meanwhile, we also did logo design and brochures.

Vitaly: I mean, I think when I look at your portfolio, I think you’ve done everything, everything, everything.

Veerle: I remember the app now. PageMill.

Vitaly: Oh, I don’t know-

Veerle: The visual editor. Do you know?

Vitaly: No. So, I got on the web somewhere like 1999, right? And actually, it’s funny that we’re saying that because we just had a conversation with with a friend, and there was this notion that came up that I remember the time before the internet existed, and some of the new generations, they just don’t know that time before the internet existed, right? So, I’m wondering, do you remember that moment when you actually saw the web for the first time or anything that... Maybe not for the first time, but where you were actually understanding what you’re seeing? What is this?

Veerle: At the first time... Yeah, the first time was text, and I wasn’t making the connection with my profession at all.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: But then I think once... I try to remember the exact moment of... I think things changed when GoLive. Do you remember micro-

Vitaly: Yeah, GoLive was-

Veerle: Was it Macromedia?

Vitaly: Macromedia GoLive. Yeah. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah. That’s really the trick for me. Yeah. And then it was evolving fast to design webpages basically.

Vitaly: One thing I learned about you as well, because I was just curious, just researching a little bit. So, you’re actually left-handed, but then you taught yourself how to write right so you become right handed.

Veerle: Not myself.

Vitaly: Not yourself.

Veerle: It was in school. I mean, first... Let me say here in English. When you’re six years old and you start to learn to write and-

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: Well, as a little kid, I say toddler-

Vitaly: Yeah. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah, when you are four or five years old, the teacher is trying to teach you to write your name. So, they write your name on the board.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: And for me, it was like drawing my name. I didn’t understand letters at that age. I was drawing them mirrorly, in mirror. I don’t know how or why something in my brain is, yeah, wrongly wired, I guess.

Vitaly: Right, but-

Veerle: I saw it, and I didn’t understand. My mom was always saying, “Look, Veerle has written her name.” And she was holding it in front of the mirror, so everybody saw them correctly, my name correctly. Then I didn’t understand why they’re already making such a fuss. I didn’t get it. I was too little to understand.

Vitaly: But how does this work? Does it mean that you can actually write with both left hand and right hand, your name, everything?

Veerle: I can, actually.

Vitaly: So, this is your magical power. Have you been using the magical power? So, what would be... So your mouse, is it then in the left hand or in the right hand, or you’re using a trackpad?

Veerle: Right, my right hand. Yeah, that’s why also I have sometimes trouble with those drawing Wacoms.

Vitaly: Wacom tablets.

Veerle: Tablets. Tablets. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. It’s like I’m used to use my right hand for the mouse, but then drawing is with my left hand. So, I was always like, I don’t know, in some kind of dilemma.

Vitaly: Right. Right.

Veerle: Should I use my left hand? Should I use my right hand? So, it was always a mix up and a struggle to use it properly.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: On one hand, it was a good thing because I could use my right hand for the things I’m used to with the mouse, and then switch to left for when I want to draw, but it was confusing me, and also a bit frustrating me because it was always which hands to use. That’s why I like drawing on the iPad, because then I have the pencil in my hand and I’m just drawing, and the rest I can do with my finger or... It’s less confusing or-

Vitaly: Sure. So, then also speaking about the tools that you’re using, I’m curious. So, you’re using an iPad. What tools do you use to get these ideas out into this world? Do you still sketch in the sketchbook first, and then you go into an iPad? Or what tools do you use to bring your ideas to life?

Veerle: I still use pencil and paper a lot. I don’t know why, because on an iPad, you can do it actually as good, as fast as possible. But somehow, I don’t know. I like having my sketchbook in my hands and draw on paper. Maybe it’s just that old fashioned maybe.

Vitaly: Yeah, I can imagine you going in the garden, and then you sit down maybe. And you say, okay, now I’m going to come up with all these wonderful ideas and then bring it into world, right?

Veerle: Yeah, sometimes, if weather permits and time permits. Sometimes I don’t have enough time to do it actually, sketch and... Sometimes it’s directly an illustrator. It’s weird to say that. But let’s say I have this client and I’m doing a lot of icon designs now for them, and they want an icon. I’m not saying that my deadline is three hours, but they is expected to have it done the same day. So, I’m often googling. It’s not very common icons, like hamburger menu or a home icon. It’s more very technical and specific. So, I enter some keywords in Google and see what comes up. And I usually end up with icon at the end or illustration icon. And I browse through the ideas, the concepts that I see, like I don’t know, a basket or a-

Vitaly: Sure.

Veerle: ... I don’t know, a pencil or something. And I say, okay, I can use that, or a house icon.

Vitaly: Yeah. But also after all these projects that you must have heard over all these years, do you feel like, I don’t know, whenever my client comes to you with a particular issue, particular problem, particular project, you’re like, “Okay, I’ve done this before. I think I’m pretty comfortable just going in, and just I can start right away in Illustrator?” Do you feel like you always need this kind of ideation phase, brainstorming phase beforehand to just get in? Or do you feel like... Because this is something that happens to me sometimes.

Whenever I have to write about anything, sometimes you give me any topic, I think I can start comfortably, and with any topic, I mean not necessarily about law, let’s say, or about physics, right? But anything design, I think I can start all the time. I need to do research and come up with all the points and all that, but I can start easily. And I think that the most difficult part sometimes for me to reach, just start, to kind of have a place where I want to go from. And then I kind of explore when to go. Is it similar for you? Would you say that every single project requires you to sit down to research, to try to understand what is it exactly that the needs are, and then design from scratch every time?

Veerle: It depends. Usually, I need some time to have do some rich research, instead of starting just right away from scratch. But I have a couple of clients where I do a lot of work for them, and I know their style and I immediately know the direction, and then I don’t have to do that. But that’s usually layout things that need a bit less of actual new design work. Sometimes I can then recuperate things already created and I’m making a variation of it and built further on that same concept because it needs to be in the same line, in the same direction. But if it’s a new project, a new client, then no. I don’t think I can do, okay, jump directly and Illustrator, or in InDesign or whatever, and start straight away. I always have to browse around for ideas and do some sketching, do some research before. Yeah.

Vitaly: Do you have collage books that we used to have in the day where you would have all the different topics kind of put together, and whenever we have a projects related to healthcare, you have your healthcare folder with all the projects related to healthcare or anything like that.. or something like that?

Veerle: No. What I sometimes do is also... I don’t know if the app, Milanote?

Vitaly: It sounds very familiar, yes.

Veerle: It is an app that I like to use to gather all the things that I like that I come across and I found relevant to the project. It can either be a design style, a color palette, sometimes even sometimes that is not really related to the project, but an element in there that I like, a composition or mood boarding.

Vitaly: Yeah, mood boarding. I mean, actually talking about that, your inspiration stream has been going now for I don’t know how many decades, I think. Because I remember vividly for projects that I had, because I also do with the consultancy every now and again, right? And then we’re speaking with designers about, okay, what would be the style that we would be pursuing here? Would it be going that direction? More playful, less playful, more formal, less formal.” I’ll say, “Oh no, you just go to Veerle. Just go to Veerle.” This is like a-

Veerle: Thank you.

Vitaly: ... a showcase or a gallery of all the different styles. But this is really interesting for me, because I tried to explain.. I was telling to my partner that I’m going to interview you for the podcast and we’re going to have a little session. And she asked me, “Oh, she’s a illustrator. Oh, that’s great,” because we also Belgium a lot. And she asked me, “So, what kind of style is it? What kind of illustration style?” And I almost stuck. I couldn’t tell, because the only thing I could say is that it’s vibrant, it’s playful, it’s colorful, it’s living. This is what I came up with. So, I’m wondering how would you describe your style, or do you have many?

Veerle: Yeah, I think I have many. It’s a bit... I think I try to adapt to what a client wants, because a project that I’ve been working on the past month is a book for a client, one of a long-term client that I love working with. And every page is an illustration. And at first, I remember that I tried to set a style for those illustrations and it’s with people. And I thought like, okay, I’m going to keep them very simple, and I gave them a blue skin, very fantasy. I thought if I use blue, it’s also colorless. All kind of people can be that. It can be visualized or represented by blue figures. But she didn’t like it.

And then she showed me, I like this and that style, because I presented also to her, in which direction should I go? And she picked a couple of pictures, of images that I presented to her. And so I had to change my style a little bit. So, that’s why I always think if people ask me, “What is your design style?” I don’t have a very specific style, but I think the way you describe it could work. I mean, colorful for sure.

Vitaly: Yeah, it’s colorful, for sure.

Veerle: It’s always try to include it to make it a bit playful, depending on the project. But there’re usually the restrictions.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: The client of course, wants this and it’s not like I’m a pure illustrator that has this style and the client comes to me because of this style, and I stick to very strictly... How do you say it? This style.

Vitaly: Yeah. But I mean-

Veerle: It’s a bit broader.

Vitaly: Yeah, but it’s very difficult for me to imagine you working on one of those corporate dry booklets. I mean, maybe you have, of course, but I just cannot imagine that. Maybe I should be diving a bit more into your inspiration stream.

Veerle: Well, the inspiration stream is, of course, not mine.

Vitaly: Yeah, yeah, sure. But I mean, it’s also collected by you, by yourself.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: So, there are all these different styles, but I cannot spot any dry — super dry — corporate style there.

Veerle: No. No.

Vitaly: That’s probably not-

Veerle: That doesn’t speak to me usually. Yes. True. So, that reflects to my own style of design.

Vitaly: I’m wondering, that’s probably also something that many people might be wondering. So, because you’ve been in the industry for quite a long time, when do you think you had this moment when you realize, okay, I can now work with the Facebooks and the Googles and the big companies? How did this happen? When did you experience this kind of, I wouldn’t say breakthrough, but it’s more like a position where you felt like, oh wow, I feel very comfortable now with this space, speed, design in general, and I’m working now with big clients. Because normally... I think that many people listening to this now, maybe starting out as designers, they might be wondering, how do you even get there? It seems like such a remote, distant dream to be working with this clients. So, what would you tell them? And how was it for you?

Veerle: Yeah, for me, it was, of course, due to the block that I got a breakthrough, become popular within the world of web design and everything. So, due to conferences and... I don’t know.

Vitaly: So, you kind of started getting more visible, is that... So, basically-

Veerle: Yeah.

Vitaly: ... how did it work for you? So, for the blog, did you have a schedule, like, okay, I’m going to write at least once a week or month or anything like that?

Veerle: No, it was more like when I had time. And back in that day, around I’m talking like 2004, 2008, that period was most that I spent weekends and everything, hours writing for the blog. And yeah, I just made time. I didn’t go biking either back then.

Vitaly: Well, now you can have the luxury of going biking, right?

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. But still, it’s not like I can, how you say, take a holiday or sit on my lazy As and do nothing. I have to work hard still to make living-

Vitaly: Yeah, of course.

Veerle: ... unfortunately. But back then, I got more visibility, I think, and that’s how they reached out to me for work. Before, just when the internet was... Before I started blogging... And so I had declined the Library of Congress. That was also because of my knowledge of director, Macromedia director, because you could also do interactive gaming things online with that app. And I remember that the site got nominated by Macromedia back then I was site of the day and site of the week. And so that’s how they got in contact with me. And for Google and Facebook, that was actually just the same because I was then in the CSS gallery from here and there, galleries and awards and stuff. And that’s how I ended up working for Facebook on a project. I never had it in my portfolio, unfortunately. It’s something that never got launched. I did do a nice creative job for them, but it was earlier.

Vitaly: Yeah. I think also for me, it’s always been about two things, I think. I always felt like there is a very, very strong need to be present, to share. And I mean, this is also something that has been very close to your heart because you’ve been sharing, and you are still sharing a lot. So, this sharing has always been a very important part of me. And I think that this is through sharing, where you actually not only get to meet wonderful people who like your work, who talk to you about your work, and maybe they share with you their work, but this is also how you kind of spread the word about yourself.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: So, that has been always a kind of very, very-

Veerle: That’s actually the most important part. That’s how I got into the CSS galleries. Yeah. Actually, a most important part that I left out there.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think so as well.

Veerle: Yeah. Because I started that tutorial. There was one tutorial that I shared towards designers who wanted to learn a little bit of coding. How can I code a homepage? And I explained in different parts, here’s how you create a header, here’s how you create the page itself, header, content, footer. Now, I’m explaining it very, very short but... And I explained it going from actually designing it in Photoshop, and then cutting it in parts and-

Vitaly: There a slicing and everything.

Veerle: ... explain how CCS work, very, very basic steps, and then very rudimentary language, very simple so that everyone could understand it. And that got so popular and picked up by so many sites who were way, way bigger than me. But that elevated me up there amongst all the others, and I got an invited for speaking at conference.

Vitaly: That’s right.

Veerle: So, that’s how the ball got rolling it. And then the blog was redesigned and it got an award again, and it never stopped.

Vitaly: Yeah. Are you planning on the fifth redesign at some point?

Veerle: At the moment, I’m actually doing a little... It’s not a redesign, but I’m fiddling with the colors and things a little bit

Vitaly: Like you always are, so I didn’t expect anything else. Yeah.

Veerle: Yeah. It’s always harder for yourself, doing-

Vitaly: Yes.

Veerle: ... improvements on work, and also finding the time.

Vitaly: Absolutely.

Veerle: I thought I would’ve launched it by now, the things that I’ve done, I worked a little bit over the Christmas period, but I’m still in the middle of it.

Vitaly: Yeah, of course. I’m also speaking with a lot of junior designers, and very often what I hear is that they have a hard time kind of putting the word out there. So, I feel like maybe back then, for me, it was quite straightforward because there was not much. I mean, there were maybe what handful of people, maybe 30, 40 people who are writing and blogging and being very public about this and sharing.

Veerle: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: Now, I feel like everybody’s posting. And now, you can generate a perfect SEO optimized, shared ChatGPT powered article about design and so on. Do you think that you would be doing the same today if you were in this position, let’s say, not 20 years ago, but today? Would you be trying to be visible on TikTok and Instagram or LinkedIn? I don’t know what would be-

Veerle: I think I probably would. I’m not sure. It’s hard. It’s a whole different period. For us, it was all so very new. I remember Twitter. I remember Jeremy Kieth told me like, “Hey, there’s this Twitter thing. You should check it out.” I was like, huh, Twitter, what’s that? And he explained, and I was like, okay, I’m going to check it out. That’s how I got on Twitter back then.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: Because we were all on... I don’t know if you were too on Pownce?

Vitaly: Oh yes, I remember that. I know for sure that I registered an account. I registered an account on Pownce, and then I think I never posted anything. I mean, there were a couple of apps or a couple of sites, social media sites back then. But I think... I don’t know, for me, I always liked... I liked to write. It was all about writing for me. Because when I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer. Well, that didn’t happen, but I really wanted to write. But it’s not about me. I mean, this podcast, of course, is not about me.

Veerle: But I think I would do TikTok and Instagram. Now, I’ve been using my Instagram always for just photos and everything, but I think I would more try to be visible with my work via Instagram and TikTok and stuff like that.

Vitaly: I think so. I mean, I also remember that one thing that’s really excited me back then, I think it’s still the same, I mean, every single day, I happened to meet, even without being kind of proactive about it, but I happen to stumble upon work people just accidentally, either by searching or by going through some feeds or LinkedIn on... I tend to use Twitter less these days. I always find interesting people. And this is something that’s really keeps motivating me as well. I feel like I always learn somebody who is doing something absolutely incredible. And so this is something that I can also then take and learn from. And I always try to take that step to reach out to that person and just talk to them or exchange thoughts or work or whatever. That’s really, really... I mean, that’s that kind of growth of networking I saw. That’s really, really, really important.

Veerle: Yeah, that’s what I tried actually also, reaching out to people that you admire.

Vitaly: And they reply back. It’s not like they’re in the castle somewhere. Very often, they would reply back. And those emails from those people who do reply back, I remember them forever. I mean, sometimes I’d think, well, why bother sending a message to somebody who has been, I don’t know, designing a famous typeface or something. They reply, and then this thing really keeps me kind of fueling and motivating me.

Veerle: Yeah, me too.

Vitaly: Maybe turning the kind of direction of the conversation a little bit, I’m also curious to know maybe some of the really challenging projects you worked on. What would we say, looking back now, what was some of the most difficult design projects or illustration projects that you were involved with, as long as you can speak about it?

Veerle: I think the most challenging one was actually in the time before internet, the CD-ROM thing. We did... Well, Geert and I did a project for Ernst & Young and a CD-ROM project called Oscan. It was a bit corporate, but it was a lot of creativity. At first, we actually had to win it because it was between us and another agency. So, we got the job eventually, but it was from A to Z, from production, packaging. It was actually a browser hand. The packaging, it was a big browser hand that you could open, and the CD-ROM was sitting in the browser hand. It was in five languages. There was a lot of design work, and it was a lot of technicalities also with testing on windows. That was actually the most challenging, because it was first, to get the job. And then I think we worked on it for more than a year to get it finished. Also with voiceover. It was with voiceover and was very graphically.

Vitaly: So, I assume that must have taken quite a bit of time, quite a bit of time.

Veerle: It was. Like I said, we worked more than a year on it. The other one was for a screensaver.

Vitaly: A screensaver?

Veerle: Yes. It was called Caveman, and it was with a caveman. And it was like with volcanoes, and it was very fun. But I remember how the result was still like... Now, you would look at it, it was like from the dark ages, the pixels and the stuff. Yeah, it was early nineties, but it was so fun.

Vitaly: Oh, I can imagine. So, would you say that coming back and looking back, do you find that doing design work now is easier or more difficult?

Veerle: That’s hard to say.

Vitaly: I mean, of course, we have much better technology and tooling and all of that.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. So, I would say in that respect, it’s easier, but it’s also difficult in a way that there’s so much apps, so to learn. On the other hand, back then it was also a lot to learn. The creative challenges, of course, the same. The tools are easier. Because I remember in the early days when I used Illustrator... Now, I can do stuff in two clicks to say it simple. And back then, it was like it would take me more than two hours to do the same.

Vitaly: Yeah. So, you’ve also done quite a bit of illustration work. I’m curious... So at some point, you just knew that, okay, so you’ve been drawing and you’ve been designing, you’ve been this, and from everything from packaging to stationary and everything, right? Did you want to just say something like, “Okay, I’m done with this. I want to explore fonts. I want to design fonts now, or “I’m done with this. I’m going to go for music. I’m going to create music now?” Did you have this moments where you said, “Okay, I want to explore something entirely different?” Or maybe it was just a different style illustration that you would be experimenting. Because for me... The reason why I’m asking is because I have this problem that I always feel like I’m jumping in with both feet in some topic. And then I realize, oh, I’m done with it now. I want to do something and tiredly different.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: And then I jumped from UX to design, to front end, to performance accessibility. That’s been like the path for my entire journey so far. What is it like for you.

Veerle: I think because my jobs, and I mean the projects that we work on are so diverse, that I always feel like there’s something different. Tomorrow, I work on, this could be illustration work. And the week after, I work on print. Then I work again on some website, then again on some apps, app design. Because of this constant mixture, I don’t have the urge to do something entirely different because it’s always something different. In a way, I can see what you say. That has been on my mind actually, to design a farm. This has always something like, oh, that would be so great to do, design a font. On the other hand, I think there are so many... How do you say? It’s such a specialty that I think maybe I won’t be good at it. Because to design a font, it’s not simple. So, it’s a good font, I mean, really good font. If it’s a script font and from the, you know—

Vitaly: Handwritten font, or so...

Veerle: And even that... Yeah, you can say, okay. But if it’s a sans or sans serif, there’s so many things to take into account, like the letter O needs to be a little bit bigger because it’s round. And then you have all these little things that you have to keep in mind. And then there is the tracking and the kerning and everything.

Vitaly: Sure. Sure. That’s a science for itself, of course.

Veerle: I think I gave up the idea because of it. I actually did design a font belt, not font font, but there was once a project from a guy. I think it’s the guy who founded Skillshare, actually. He had a book project way back before he founded Skillshare, grab back book or something. And he asked many creative people to do something totally out of their comfort zone, totally different. And for me, my task was create a font. So, others had another task, like create a poster or... So, that was the only time. I actually designed a font, but it was not like a font with font files and everything. It was pure on design and it got printed in a book. So, it never got further than that.

Vitaly: Maybe it’s not even necessary anymore, because of course, we have wonderful power of artificial intelligence coming our way. And I’m really had to ask this question, of course. And we could just ask, I don’t know, AI to just design a font of our dreams.

Veerle: Yeah, exactly.

Vitaly: But I am wondering-

Veerle: It’s easy.

Vitaly: I am wondering at this point, how do you see... I mean, we have all these tools from Midjourney to, I mean DALL-E And so many others, all these AI tools that allow you to generate an image or support you in some way, assist you in some way to get that perfect photo, that perfect illustration, to that perfect landscape, that perfect whatever. How do you see that? Do you actually in some way use or think about using AI for your work, or do you feel like this cannot-

Veerle: So far, I haven’t used it. No. In a way, I kind of see it... It’s back in the days when Photoshop introduced effects and we’re all like, “Whoa, yes, let’s try it out.” And it’s like something new and everybody’s jumping at it. Like we say in Dutch, fly on a shit... I find it a little bit, I don’t know, artificial, too artificial, like the word says. It’s probably going to serve us as help, and in a way, as a tool. Yeah. But on the other hand, I have so many questions about it. I don’t know if you heard... And I was already asking that same question in my head, what about copyrights, the photos that is in there, that they’re using? And I, not so long ago, I think a couple of days ago, I read something about Getty Images asking the question like, “Hey, you guys are using pictures, images of our Getty Images collection.” So, I think they’re going, they’re going to be trouble here and there as well. It’s not that easy—

Vitaly: Yeah. This is actually still a big question that is, to be honest, that seems to be, I wouldn’t say dismissed, but it is not taken seriously often. But you still see some issues where many of the applications that are generating those images, they actually have, in the terms and conditions, a very clear statement that this only for personal use and so on and so forth. But in general, of course, whenever we think about this, one big question that comes in my way is that obviously whenever artificial intelligence is generating those images, these images have a copyrighted designed by humans. So if there were no humans, there wouldn’t be any design work done by AI, right? And then the question is, there is no credit, there is no compensation. Of course, there is mining, data mining.

And this, of course, brings up questions. I mean, when I was looking and playing with DALL-E and Midjourney, and there are so many tools at this point, I was very impressed with results. I mean, I was seriously impressed with the results. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an actual photo or that kind of artwork... Maybe it looked a little bit too perfect at times, and sometimes it had these really strange things where everything looks perfect, but then a person has six fingers instead of five.

Veerle: Yes, I saw something similar.

Vitaly: Yeah, those things happen every now and again. But if you just focus on the face, let’s say, then this problem doesn’t occur. But then there is kind of something almost magical where you can... I mean, at this point, I think also in Figma, you have these options to say, dear Figma, I need a photo of a barista in front of tiled, I don’t know, tiled bakery, whatever in Portugal, and the picture, the result is incredible. I mean, I have to say that this is absolutely stunning. The question of course that I’m asking myself and that many of my colleagues are wondering about is, what does it mean? So, would we, as designers or researchers, use it, or would we be trying to fight the war against the windmill? Because there are so many of those tools. But that’s a question that hasn’t been answered yet. And again, it has raises a lot of ethical concerns as well.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Especially the last thing you mentioned, ethical concerns. And I don’t know, in a way, I can see its purpose, but then on the other hand, I don’t know if it goes that far that it’s overtakes our entire job. I mean, I don’t know what’s-

Vitaly: Yeah, it’s hard to say, because I was this case, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it or not, where there was a project, where an administrator was working on a project. And then I think three or four months in project, he was fired. And what the owners of the company then said, “Well, you’ve designed 15 administration. We can now design the rest with AI.”

Veerle: Okay.

Vitaly: So, we can mine your style and maybe a few more images, or millions of images around the world, and we can replicate your style. So, we don’t necessarily need you to be on this project. I was like, wow. So, those things happened.

Veerle: Wow. And that happened and he didn’t... Did he say, “Okay, here are the royalties?”

Vitaly: I mean, he did the work, and the first, I think 15 images or so, they were paid for, but the rest was kind of canceled, because you can produce the results with a handful of images, and obviously a lot of other data around. So that, again, raises some questions and concerns.

Veerle: Yes.

Vitaly: So, I’m not quite sure-

Veerle: That’s true.

Vitaly: ... what we’re getting with this.

Veerle: Then we have to put a copyrighting in our estimate before taking on the job, like, here’s the copyright.

Vitaly: Yeah, I think in the end-

Veerle: Because otherwise, no. I mean-

Vitaly: I think in some way, this will become probably something that we will be including in our contract or that we’ll be dealing with as terms and conditions. But I’m very hopeful.

Veerle: Yes, terms and conditions...

Vitaly: I think the future looks bright, so we shouldn’t be... I mean, obviously we need to be very careful about what we’re doing there and how we’re managing all that, but I’m hopeful that the community is better off with AI. We shouldn’t be fighting AI too much.

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think it’ll have its place, but I don’t think it’ll be that far, like it overtakes our job. I don’t know. I don’t think that. I don’t believe that. I mean, we’re all still human. I mean, needs the human emotional touch and everything. But I see it as... I hope we can use it as a tool and not that it doesn’t overtake us.

Vitaly: Yeah. So, do you think, Veerle, that maybe four years, three, four, five years from now, you’ll be writing a nice article on your blog about how to use AI to speed up your creative process?

Veerle: Who knows? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Vitaly: Maybe.

Veerle: Or it will, I don’t know, get a very bad taste and a very bad, I don’t know, thing, reputation. But I don’t know if it go will go that far, and it’ll not survive. I don’t think it’ll probably survive.

Vitaly: Well, maybe there is something good around that as well. Because while the AI is busy doing the design work, you can go on biking, which is why I have to ask you about, as we are wrapping up here, maybe you could share us with some of the most memorable destinations that you actually have traveled to on your bike. What were some of the highlights in your journey? And what was the longest trip you ever taken?

Veerle: I think the longest trip or the longest ride was 207 kilometers.

Vitaly: 207. Wow.

Veerle: Yeah. But it was in Belgium. I think-

Vitaly: It was all around Belgium still?

Veerle: Yeah, I sometimes go towards direction of France and the Netherlands over the border, but it’s not that I have biked in some destination far away. So, the Balearic Islands, that’s the forest where I’ve rode my bike. It’s more in my own country that I bike. But there’s so many little roads here. I’m still amazed by how many roads there are. And then that I still ride roads that I haven’t ridden. And they’re like, I don’t know, 15 kilometers from here, or 10 kilometers from here. And I say like, huh, didn’t discover that one. I’m always thinking I should... I put my bike rides on Strava, and I think you can look up a heat map. And if I do Flanders, the heat map of Flanders, it’s really dense. I’ve ridden over and over and over. If I see the total kilometers that I’ve ridden, I’ve ridden a couple of times around the world.

Vitaly: Oh wow.

Veerle: The kilometers.

Vitaly: That could be. But I think-

Veerle: Like whoa, that’s mind blowing.

Vitaly: Yeah.

Veerle: I ride my bike more than I drive my car.

Vitaly: Oh wow.

Veerle: It’s like double the kilometers in a year.

Vitaly: Yeah. But maybe we should import you into Black Forest, and I’d be very curious how far you go there.

Veerle: It is one of the locations I would really love to go. My local bakery that I go every weekend, he’s like a fan of that area. He’s also a mountain biker. And every year, his holiday is always the Black Forest, and he’s always bragging about it. “If you want some rights from there, I can share you some, and just let me know when you go.”

Vitaly: Well, I think maybe that’s a sign for you to keep in the loop. Please let us know question when you happen to be there. Maybe as a final question here to wrap up, I always ask this question because it always gives me kind of a clue about the motivation, the dreams that guests like to have. Do you have a particular dream project that you ever wished you could work with? So, if somebody from any company could listen to this now or in the future think maybe Veerle wants to work on this incredible project, we should reach out. So, if you had a dream project or if you have a dream project, what would you desperately want to work on one day?

Veerle: Oh man. Well, actually dream project would be if the client says that would’ve really already make it, that would already make me very happy, if I have a lot of time to work on a project, like if they say-

Vitaly: A year.

Veerle: ... you do your thing. I love to have boundaries, but if you can go to your full potential of your creativity and there’s like no deadline... Usually, they clients want things done too fast. And usually, you always end up, like hmm, if I had a little bit more time, I would made this better and better. The things that end up in my portfolio, the things that I’m happy with, that I like, there’s so many work, it’s like 10% of all the work I’ve done, because a lot of projects are like that it has to go so fast, or they put it online, but they have implemented it wrongly, stuff like that. There’s always something. So, my dream project would be if there’s a project from A to Z, it’s like perfect done, a lot of creativity. It can be anything really. I’ve always dreamt in school that I would end up in packaging design. I haven’t done much packaging design, but if I could do, create a brand logo, and then the whole packaging of the interior of, if it’s a shop, an interior, the building, whatever.

Vitaly: But you already did design a logo for an airline, isn’t that right?

Veerle: Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it was actually... It was not a big project. It sounds like because it’s for an airline, it’s like big. It was actually like, we want an icon on the plane, and our logo has this colors, but we want an icon. And so I kind of designed a star shape, I think. And that was like... Yeah, I was proud of it because it was on a plane.

Vitaly: Did you fly the plane with your icon?

Veerle: No. No.

Vitaly: No?

Veerle: No.

Vitaly: Oh, maybe that... So if anybody listening to this owns an airline or a train or a bike or anything and is willing to maybe put an icon... That would be nice to have a bike with your work on it. That’d be nice.

Veerle: Yeah. Yea.

Vitaly: Yes. So, please get in touch with Veerle. I’m sure she would appreciate that. All right.

Veerle: Thank you.

Vitaly: So, we’ve been learning quite a bit about illustration and design and workflow, and AI even a little bit in here, but what have you been learning about lately, Veerle? Anything that you’ve learned, or maybe outside of the scope of design altogether, anything that you felt like, oh wow, I didn’t know that earlier, so here we go, now I know it?

Veerle: Well, actually I’m currently working with Figma, and I didn’t know it. It’s because of the project with the client, the developer is also using Figma and other designers in the team are using Figma. And otherwise, I would jump in with my Adobe XD and I thought like, okay, it’s to speed up the process, and also to work together on something and share. It’s not that you can’t do it with Adobe XD, but they’re already using Figma. So, I’m learning Figma. It’s the first steps, but yeah, it’s been fun, actually. I’m liking it. You can also copy paste from Illustrate, for me is very important.

Vitaly: Yeah, I can imagine.

Veerle: I’m doing most of icon design work. It’s for webpages and a web app. And so it’s handy that I can copy paste. And I’m also using... I’m also trying out Affinity Designer. I’ve been working in it a couple of times now. It’s also very early phase. So, I think I’ve spent, if it’s an hour already. So, it’s really short time, but yeah, I’m liking it so far. So, I’m stepping out of the Adobe environment a little bit to learn a little bit more. Yeah. And then I think on my iPad, I’m doing a lot of water coloring-

Vitaly: Oh, that’s nice.

Veerle: ... coloring digitally, trying out a couple of brushes. And so that’s also a bit new.

Vitaly: Never stop learning then.

Veerle: Yeah, never stop learning.

Vitaly: So maybe now, if you, at some point in the future, will find a nice Figma tutorial on Veerle’s blog, you know what direction-

Veerle: Who knows?

Vitaly: ... she ended up going. Well, if you, the listener, would like to hear more from Veerle, you can find her on Twitter where she’s @vpieters, and also in home homepage, of course, which is veerle.duoh.com, veerle.duoh.com.

Veerle: I’m actually not much on Twitter anymore-

Vitaly: Not much on Twitter.

Veerle: ... to be honest.

Vitaly: So, is it now... What is cool at this point?

Veerle: Actually not-

Vitaly: So, what-

Veerle: Mastodon.

Vitaly: Mastodon. So, are you on Mastodon a lot?

Veerle: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And I’m going... You asked me, you are redesigning my blog. I’m actually also going to do a lot of writing on my blog. Little short post that I tend to do before on Twitter. I’m moving it a bit to my blog.

Vitaly: Right.

Veerle: It’s called Side Notes. I’m going to call it Side Notes, but it’s still in the making. I’ll try to make good progress that it’s will be online very soon to replace the whole Twitter feed. But up until now, I’m posting the things on Mastodon.

Vitaly: That sounds-

Veerle: It’s actually what I did before Twitter was here. So, I’m picking up from way back.

Vitaly: Sure. But we’ll be following along for sure. So with this in mind, thank you so much for joining us today, Veerle. Do you have any parting words of wisdom? Imagine somebody listening to this 20 years from now and thinking, how did they design things back in the day? Do you have a message to the future or share-

Veerle: Message to the future.

Vitaly: ... I don’t know, words of wisdom to people out there?

Veerle: I think always keep on learning, I think. And open your eyes, try to soak in inspiration from everywhere, even just go outside, find inspiration in nature. Look around, open your eyes. If you are walking in the streets, look at the signs, signs of shops and everything. Yeah, try to keep an open vision, I think, and never stop learning. These are my words.

Posted on

#18 – Leonardo Losoviz on the Block Protocol’s Efforts To Make Blocks Work Universally

On the podcast today we have Leonardo Losoviz. He’s here today to talk about The Block Protocol.

Ever since WordPress 5.0 was released several years ago, we’ve been using blocks to create content inside of WordPress. More and more blocks have been developed to manage the creation of content, and the display of this content on the front end.

With WordPress 5.9, anyone using a block based theme has been able to manage more of their site with blocks; the header, the footer, menus and more.

It’s a real shift in the way that content and sites are created, and puts end users in control of the way that their website looks. But, the content that you create with your WordPress blocks are limited to your website.

It’s not just WordPress that is using blocks though. Go to almost any modern SaaS app and you’ll see content blocks in use. It’s such an easy process to understand. You want text, use a text block, perhaps an image, use the image block. In this way, non technical users can build up their content easily.

For obvious reasons, every app and CMS which is using blocks has built their own implementation for their own needs; the needs of their users and customers.

The Block Protocol is a new attempt to unify the way that blocks work. If you create a block on your WordPress site, that same content could be consumed and used elsewhere, seamlessly. The reverse would be true as well. If you stop to think about it, that’s a really powerful idea.

Leonardo talks to us today about the Block Protocol, what it is and how it might work.

We discuss some of the benefits that the protocol might bring, as well as some of the barriers which are undoubtedly in the way of its development and adoption. Who might benefit from using such a protocol and whether or not we can realistically expect this to be implemented in the near future.

The Block Protocol

Leonardo’s article about The Block Protocol

Leo’s website

Leo’s Twitter

Graph QL plugin website

Block Protocol Project Aims to Create Universal Block System, May Collaborate with Gutenberg

‘Standards’ XKCD cartoon

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley. Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the future of blocks outside of WordPress. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WP Tavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

I’d really like to hear from anyone out there who would like to come onto the podcast and talk about whatever it is that you do with WordPress. It might be that you’re a developer, a WordCamp organizer, a contributor, a designer. Honestly, if it’s about WordPress, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you on the show. Head over to WP Tavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Leonardo Losoviz. He’s here to talk about the block protocol. Ever since WordPress 5.0 was released several years ago. We’ve been using blocks to create content inside of WordPress. More and more blocks have been developed to manage the creation of content, and the display of this content on the front end. With WordPress 5.9, anyone using a block-based theme is able to manage more of their site with blocks. The header, the footer, menus and more. It’s a real shift in the way that content and sites are created and puts the end user in control of the way that their website looks. But the content that you create with your WordPress blocks are limited to your website. It’s not just WordPress that’s using blocks though. Go to almost any modern SaaS app and you’ll see content blocks in use.

It’s such an easy process to understand. You want text, use a text block. Perhaps an image, well use the image block. In this way, non-technical users can build up their content easily. For obvious reasons, every app and CMS, which is using blocks has built their own implementation for their own needs. The needs of their users and their customers.

The block protocol is a new attempt to unify the way that blocks work, so that if you create a block on your WordPress site, the same content could be consumed and used elsewhere, seamlessly. The reverse would be true as well. If you stop to think about it, this is a really powerful idea.

Leonardo talks to us today about the block protocol, what is, and how it might work. We discuss some of the benefits that the protocol might bring, as well as some of the barriers which are undoubtedly in the way of its development and adoption. Who might benefit from using such a protocol, and whether or not we can realistically expect this to be implemented in the near future.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes. Head over to WP Tavern.com forward slash podcast. And look for episode number 18. And so without further delay, I bring you Leonardo Losoviz.

I am joined on the podcast today by Leonardo Losoviz. Hello Leonardo.

[00:04:02] Leonardo Losoviz: Hey, Nathan, how are you?

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Very good. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today. We’ll get stuck into the main content a little bit later. We’re going to be talking today about something called the block protocol. But before that a little introduction from you, Leonardo, if that’s okay, how come you’re on a WordPress podcast? What is it that draws you to WordPress? Are you a coder or a developer? What’s your background with tech?

[00:04:24] Leonardo Losoviz: I’m a developer. I’ve been working with WordPress since 2012 I believe. And, I work or I have a plugin that is a GraphQL server for WordPress and I work with that pretty much every day. And as I develop the plugin I have insights on other topics. So in particular, the whole of the block protocol is one of the things that I could connect to because of my background with GraphQL.

[00:04:50] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much indeed. Now I’m going to draw everybody’s attention to an article. I will link to it in the show notes. So if you’re not familiar, go to WP Tavern.com forward slash podcast, and today’s episode will be listed there.

And in that set of show notes will be links to all of the bits and pieces that we happen to mention today. And the first one is an article that you wrote on the smashing magazine website called implications of WordPress joining the block protocol. This is an idea that was raised really recently. The idea being that there is this third party idea, it’s not a WordPress idea and it’s called the block protocol.

Would you just like to very, in the broadest possible terms? Just tell us what the block protocol is.

[00:05:37] Leonardo Losoviz: All right. I will try my best.

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[00:05:39] Leonardo Losoviz: So the block protocol is an idea to get blocks to be interoperable between different applications. So right now, when we are using WordPress, we have the WordPress editor. We are composing a blog post with blocks and seeing the latest version of WordPress, version 5.9. We can also create layouts. We can create the full site, via what’s called a full site editor ,via blocks. Now these blocks that we’re using on WordPress, they can only be used in WordPress.

So there’s this guy, Joel Spolsky a very famous guy. He created a stack overflow., If I’m not, if I’m not wrong. Yeah. So he came up with this idea called the block protocol, and the idea will be to get the blocks in this case from WordPress, but from any other software tool and to port them into whichever other application. Be it based on WordPress or not.

So the idea is that now we can reuse blocks among applications the same way that we can reuse components like JavaScript components nowadays. So for instance if you’re a developer, and possibly you have coded a component for React, and then you have another website for another client, you can reuse the same component.

So the idea is to do something similar with blocks. That you have developed a block for your WordPress site. And the day after tomorrow you have a different application, which is based on Node JS or on a different CMS. And you want to reuse the same block that you have for your WordPress site. With the block protocol, you could do that.

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: So, everybody I would imagine who’s listening to this podcast has some familiarity with the new block editor. That is to say, rewind to WordPress 5.0 in come blocks. Blocks are now the way that we create all content, and increasingly the way that we create everything around our website, especially with the 5.9 release and full site editing and so on.

But what may not be obvious to most users is that that content is, it is completely siloed within WordPress. So as you’ve just described, if you create some text or you create an image, you are really going to struggle in any meaningful way to take that and put it somewhere else. The best you can really hope for is going in and copying and putting it into your clipboard on your computer and then going and pasting it elsewhere.

But the intention, I believe of the block protocol, is to make it so that applications, no matter where they are based, there’ll be able to communicate with each other. And the picture that you put inside of Gutenberg would be available to some other piece of software that’s nothing to do with WordPress. Have I more or less summed it up there?

[00:08:22] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah. What you have to take into account is that with the blocks, you create content. So when we’re talking about content, you can copy paste it into different application, it’s all HTML at the end of the day. It will work here. It will work there. But blocks, we’re talking about functionality. About being able to use this functionality to create the content in first place.

So think of any block that you might actually think of, say a Google map, that you can point and click on the map, and then you have the location that you want to display. So this is functionality. Like behind the functionality you will be producing HTML, which is the embedding of the Google map. But you’ll know, you need to know how to code HTML to do that. You don’t want to do that. You want to do it with a WYSIWYG. That is, visual that you click on a dynamic map. This functionality is a block, and this is the functionality that we want to port across applications. So this is more than content.

[00:09:21] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Thank you so much for clarifying that. Okay. The article, at the beginning, you go to, you go into explain how Joel Spolsky he has got this project called the block protocol. And again, I will link in the show notes to that so that you can go and find the website there. There’s a fairly impressive website where they explain things in pretty good detail with lots of documentation, and so on. But the reason that we’re talking, is that it would appear that fairly recently, Matt Mullenweg reached out to Joel.

I don’t know if it was that way round or Joel reaching out to Matt, but either way some conversation began, I believe it was perhaps on Twitter, where Matt was essentially saying, look, it would be really interesting if we could make all of this work with Gutenberg blocks. So in other words, why don’t we see if there’s some possibility of making your block protocol and WordPress work together. So that stuff can be egress and enter WordPress websites, to other different parts of the web.

Now, in order to understand this better, you then went on to explain how a block is actually created. You’ve got this paragraph entitled what is a block. And I think, for most users of WordPress, if you’re a developer this obviously would be different, but if you’re a casual user of WordPress or you’re a publisher or an implementer, it might be that in the block editor, you just see the block and it’s a little rectangular icon and you click the button and it comes onto the website.

Of course, there’s a lot of incredible technology going on in the background. And I just wonder if you could explain to those of us who don’t necessarily understand, what is a block what’s actually going on in the background?

[00:11:00] Leonardo Losoviz: All right. If you do not understand what a block is, that’s good. You do not need to understand. All you need to do is to be able to use it. So this is, it’s complex in the sense that, you know, the simpler something is to be used, the more difficult it is to implement. Which is the great thing about Apple products. You know, that the box is just white. But that whiteness, they have a huge team of designers to come up with.

So the block, if you’re able to use a WordPress editor, then the book already succeeded. You don’t need to understand how it works or what it is, apart from the fact that you need to use it to create content, which is in this case to write a blog post or, since the later version of WordPress to create the full, the overall site, by clicking at elements.

So then what is a block? It’s a concept. It’s a unit of something, in this case it’s code, that you interact with to create content on the site. If you’re a developer, you will be developing blocks. You can be a designer and that you will be applying styles to blocks. But at the end of the day, it’s a concept. It’s not really an implementation. It’s just this idea of what you said, you know, like a square, that you click on the square possibly, and something will happen on the website. You will have created content. So yeah, it’s one of those things that now it appears everywhere because WordPress is trying to make it widespread.

This is what Matt Mullenweg had attempted to do with his concept of reducing the different interfaces that we have to interact with. So in the past with WordPress, you could create content via short codes or with the classic editor, or with the customizer. The block replaces all of these. You had to learn only one thing, which is the block, the interface with the block, and you’re able to create your website, whatever it is that you need to create.

Maybe you want to add a video. You want to embed a picture, something very simple. But now also we have more functionality, like editing pictures and possibly even editing videos in the future. It’s taking more roles. It is like an application to create cotent.

[00:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: I guess this approach is absolutely lovely. You’ve got a nice little graphic on your website where you talk about the fact that the block is kind of a container for all sorts of child components. So you could have all sorts of different things inside your block. So a block doesn’t just have to be one simple thing. It could be a multitude of layered things which could become incredibly complicated. But the point is the block encapsulates them all, but it’s siloed within WordPress. You can’t easily get it out.

And well, maybe there are ways that you can get it out, but it’s not relatively straightforward for the likes of me. So along comes Joel Spolsky with his block protocol. And the idea is that he would like all of these different bits and pieces to be interoperable. So that a block on WordPress might be able to interact, and I believe on the article that you wrote, you mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned a SaaS product called Notion, which is a bit like a note taking app, but it’s much more complicated than that. You can do all sorts of things like add bullet lists and what have you. And the premise therefore would be well, wouldn’t it be great if we could take the content that we’ve created inside of Gutenberg, inside of WordPress, and we could just have it so that it was completely interoperable and it was transparent. You could throw it over for example, to Notion or anything else. So is that the dream here is that what Joel and his block protocol is trying to enable? To make there a standard set of ways of doing things, such that everything, everywhere can communicate with anything else?

[00:14:56] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah, you said just right. It is a dream. It’s something that seems to be a bit out of reach. So far it’s a potential, it’s an idea, but from idea to implementation, it’s a long road. In particular, I don’t think that Notion will want to be part of this movement because there’s nothing in it for them. I believe that Notion has spent so much time and money developing their own blocks. So I don’t see why they will be sharing them with the wider world. Basically, if they give us their blocks, we can embed them in our WordPress site and recreate Notion. And this is the same with Medium. I don’t see them participating in this idea.

Now they could still use it, because a block protocol is a protocol. You can use it for your own internal use. That means that Medium or Notion they could have sub applications, or they could have their own internal team, their own development team, that they have internal applications and they could use the block protocol to reuse their own blocks within their own applications. But that will not be shared with us. We are using WordPress and I don’t expect to have Notion give the WordPress users access to their blocks.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I guess where you’ve got a proprietary piece of software and their way of creating revenue I suppose, is on their, the system that they’ve built with components and blocks and the ability to have a beautiful UI and all of that. It’s unlikely in your estimation that they would wish to become part of this because it removes that unique value proposition. If it’s simple to put that data in exactly the same form elsewhere, it’s unlikely they would want to be a part of that because it upsets that business model. However, that being said all is not lost. The block protocol opens up the opportunity for lots of different scenarios, not necessarily the SaaS proprietary platforms that we mentioned, but in your piece, you go on to describing in quite a large amount of detail that the types of people, teams, and applications, and so on that you feel the block protocol would fit well with. So should we just delve into this? Who might want to use the block protocol?

[00:17:07] Leonardo Losoviz: Okay. First one is, if you do not have money, which is quite a general condition for a lot of startups, then you would want to use a block, develop protocol to use blocks that are already developed by somebody else, that you can just customize for your own use.

And this is important because coding blocks is labor intensive. You need a dedicated team and that’s money and that’s time. Think about WordPress. The WordPress editor, up to now, it took five years. You have been started five years ago. And now only now after five years we have full site editing. I believe that, that was not their idea when they launch it at the very beginning or when they were planning at the very beginning. They had never expected that it will take five years to be at this stage.

It took that time because high quality software takes time to produce. Think about the accessibility issues that it will have in at the very beginning, which were fixed, but it took time. So once again, if you want to create a website using blocks and you had to create it from scratch. Then you’re going to be spending a lot of money. Now you could alternatively, depend on the block protocol, use the blocks by WordPress and just customize them for your own application. So that’s the first one.

The second one is if you have a website that you want it to be fancy, or you want to be appealing, like Medium, like Notion, but it’s kind of falling behind because, you know, I mean, we all share the same users. So I think that’s Facebook when it came out, it was a sort of tragedy for website developers who didn’t have a lot of money to hire a team because people are expecting the same quality as Facebook. Like interactivity, dynamic functionality. Eventually they released React and we could do the same, but it takes time and it takes effort.

So then once again, you need to compete against these guys. If your website is not looking good, you will fall behind, nobody going to come to your website anymore. And nowadays the technology barrier is quite high in the sense, design is so amazing. Some websites out there are so amazing and they’re are all for free.

So if somebody developed really nice looking blocks and you don’t want to fall behind, you can just use it. So in my article, I was using Mailchimp as an example, because the Mailchimp editor for creating the newsletters, it was kind of falling behind a bit. I had noticed that they were experimenting with a new editor, which was similar to the WordPress editor.

I cannot find it anymore. It was buggy and I just couldn’t use it for long, and I revert back to their current experience. So I was wondering if Mailchimp could benefit from using the WordPress blocks. So you can see WordPress, MailChimp is a multi-billion company. Like, I don’t know, ten billion dollars recently or something like that. So they could benefit from this.

Then I believe that as a content management systems in particular, I quote Drupal, they could use it because Drupal has already expressed interest in using Gutenberg. In using the WordPress editor for creating content. So now with the block protocol, it will be easier to achieve this.

The reason why it will be easier is because WordPress right now, when you develop, the WordPress editor doesn’t need to care about anyone. They just care about themselves. So at the same time that you create the functionality, on the client side, all the dynamic stuff, the layouts and everything. There has to be a backend that can field the functionality. So we have the WordPress Rest API. So whenever you have a new block, possibly the block will need a new Rest endpoint to fetch data and interact with the server. All of that is happening on WordPress and WordPress needs to certify it. But right now WordPress only cares about WordPress.

I know WordPress can certify its own requirements. Then it’s good to go. So Drupal right now needs to be catching up with WordPress all the time. If WordPress 5.8 comes out and Drupal catches up with it, and then on WordPress 5.9, they changed the API and they’re having a bit of changes lately. Then Dupal will need to also change its own API to catch up. So it’s a lot of effort to be playing catch up all the time. But if we, if they go through the block protocol, WordPress cannot go it alone anymore. They will need to satisfy a requirement imposed by a third party. So then Drupal could say, okay, now we’re integrating into WordPress anymore, all I need to do to certify this contract with this clear guidelines, set up by the third party, and as long as I do this and WordPress does the same, then I can use WordPress blocks without having to be always running behind them. So I think it could be a good thing for Drupal in particular, because they showed interest and in general, any content management system.

And finally I said, open source projects, they could use this because I hope that will happen not really with components. So if you’re a React developer and you want to have a select dropdown, you don’t need to call it from scratch. You just go to NPM, to the registry and you can search, React dropdown or React select. And that will be like quite a few components that we can download. You can install and you can have in your application.

So a block, it’s also a component. It’s a high level component, which has a definite functionality and is trying to achieve a certain goal. So I can see that if that happened in the past with components, it will also happen in the future with blocks, that developers will create blocks, which can be used by anyone.

Think of blocks like modifying like editing video or editing images. Or whatever it is really. Games, the could actually create games and published them on blocks as blocks. And then any website will embed them on their own, their own application.

[00:23:13] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a really nice list. I can really see exactly what you’re talking about, especially the sort of time saving, labor saving aspects of this. You know, teams who have a modest budget who can just leverage things which have already been built and contributed out as open source blocks within this block protocol, it’d be really useful. And like you say, applications where the constraints of money or perhaps experience are going to cause it to be really difficult to get over the line. And if you can then just dip into a bunch of prebuilt blocks that other people have already committed, that would be brilliant. And like you say, content management systems and the one that you mentioned Drupal, who’ve gone out of their way to link with Gutenberg and make their own module so that they can use Gutenberg. Yeah. It’s really interesting.

All of that though, is about, it’s about the benefits, I guess, to people if WordPress were to adopt this. So this is about people gaining a benefit, but you go on to describe it in the opposite direction. You talk about the benefits to the WordPress project of the block protocol.

Do you want to just explain your reasoning behind that? Who, well not who, what are the benefits? What are the benefits that will be brought to WordPress as a whole by the block protocol?

[00:24:32] Leonardo Losoviz: All right. The first thing I believe is that WordPress will keep growing. And the reason for that is at WordPress right now, it’s used as a content management system. But if it also provides blocks, then developers can use WordPress on a different role, which is to create the layout, the client site for the applications. So then WordPress will become more entrenched in the toolkit for creating websites. And even though WordPress right now is really quite big, you know, Matt Mullenweg wants to be even bigger, right? Like, so I think that this is a potential outcome that will happen. That WordPress becomes the default tool to create sites. Not just content management system, as it may be the case that right now, but also to create layouts for even static sites, like HTML based sites that were created with JavaScript. Now you can use WordPress for that, which is something quite new. I mean, you’ll then think of WordPress to create static HTML sites via JavaScript. But this could be a possibility.

Then if this were to happen, the modern world of developers will come into WordPress, JavaScript developers, React, Vue, Angular. So they might want to become engaged and become contributors. So I was checking the Stack Overflow survey, and currently there are three times more JavaScript developers than PHP developers in the market. So then think about it. If you’re suddenly opening up the gates to these guys, you’re opening up to, potentially three times of many contributors as we have not right now. I mean, assuming a similar rate of contribution, of course, I mean, this is just pure guessing. But the fact that you’re opening the gates to them can only bring, either nothing happens or they come in and they contribute. So this is a potential good outcome.

Then, you could have blocks available from other parties that you can import into your WordPress site. So if you have an image editor that somebody hacked ready for their own application and they use a block protocol, you can embed it to your WordPress site.

The other aspect is that the WordPress editor or Gutenberg does not live everywhere on the WordPress site. So right now, when you go to the WP admin, you’re interacting with Gutenberg. But in the WordPress site that you’re creating as a developer, you don’t have Gutenberg there. On the client side, on the site that the visitors are accessing, there’s no Gutenberg there.

So the implication of that is that it not so easy to create nice layouts or dynamic functionality, using React or using Vue or using whatever else. So power the website that your visitors are accessing. So if we had a block protocol, we could create this on a much simpler way because now Gutenberg will be talking to the WP admin or to the blocks, via the block protocol.

And the block protocol will be a single API to create websites, whether it is a WP admin, which is already going through Gutenberg, or on the public facing site, that if you’re good with React, you can create a React client that talks to the block protocol. And the block protocol will embed the blocks that you already have provided by WordPress.

So whether you’re gaining from what you already have. The idea with this is that you have this set of blocks that they only have a limited use, which is only from within the WP admin. Now you will also make these blocks available to the site, to the public facing site. Some blocks, they make no sense because they are only for editing content in the WP admin. But think of a game, you can develop a block that is a game and you could embed it on the public facing site.

So then why not? You could. Or an audio player like, this podcast, you can create a block that is a podcast player and you embedded on the site and it’s something that is just one line of code. You just add the block and everything is already existing. So once again, either you gain or nothing happened.

And then I think that blocks could be helpful in that coming phase four Gutenberg phase three, which is still some time to go, possibly 2023. Which is going to be based on collaboration. They’ve yet to use the WordPress editor or to create Google docs like experience. To communicate with other people, to collaborate that you can edit the same document. And then you can add comments on the side and you can integrate the comments or suggestions. You leave feedback. So all of these is going to be the next phase of Gutenberg. As it is now, it can only happen in the WP admin. So if we had a block protocol, all of this could also be brought to the client side. Now, particularly because you will not need to log into the WP admin any more to collaborate.

And for instance, if I have a WordPress site, I don’t give access to random people. I just give access to my editors, or the writers, right. But what if I want to collect input from normal folks from visitors? Right now the only option that I have is comments, but that’s not integrated within the editing workflow. So if you had the block protocol, you could replicate the same workflow, editing workflow experience on the public facing site and allow visitors to give you feedback or collaboration.

And then one other aspect that I mentioned in the article is that you can simplify how you render blocks dynamically, because right now there is an issue that Gutenberg has, which is that you need to create the same logic twice, once in JavaScript to render the HTML, when you’re editing the content in the WordPress editor. And once in PHP, when you’re rendering on the client for the visitor, that’s the dynamic content. So that means that the same call has to be called twice in two different technologies. And for what I have seen in the GitHub issue that was bringing this up, not everyone is comfortable with the two languages.

You might be comfortable with JavaScript, but not with PHP, or you might become comfortable with PHP, and not with JavaScript. So this gives you the alternative to do it only in JavaScript, which is not ideal because, if you do it on PHP, then you can print it on the HTML already, which has better for SEO. But at least you have the possibility to do it.

And if that were to happen, I believe that more React developers could also be engaged with WordPress because they don’t need to work with PHP anymore. They will be basically working React all the way. And it will still be a WordPress site, which is quite interesting.

And yeah, I have one more issue, one more item to mention. Which is that you can bring in developments from outside. So as I was mentioning, I’m working with GraphQL myself and what happened with GraphQL is quite interesting, quite remarkable, that you have produced a huge ecosystem of clients and tools. Which is the couple from each other. They’re not collaborate. They’re not talking to each other,. But all of these tools, they can operate with each other because they all follow the same specification.

So one single case that is quite easy to follow is static documentation of the endpoints that you’re creating with Graph QL. I believe that the same can naturally happen if we use a block protocol, that some developer out there can create a tool to create static documentation of the blocks that then you can use to document the blocks for WordPress. And if that were the case, you don’t need to develop these in-house. So that means that the WordPress contributors, they can free up their time to do something that is specific to WordPress.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: I do like the idea of people being able to access all of the pretty amazing stuff that’s been created by the WordPress community already. That seems to be really interesting. If this were to happen, all of that good stuff that’s been made would be available elsewhere and not bound distinctly to Gutenberg, but also the idea that you mentioned and somewhat counter-intuitive to me, I wouldn’t have thought about it.

The idea of having all of these blocks on the front end and the notion that you don’t need to be logged in. I guess, all sorts of complex things that are otherwise out of bounds at the moment suddenly become possible. And so as yet, unimagined scenarios potentially will become possible in the future.

Further down in your article, you’ve got a section where you have some nice diagrams which might be worth the listeners actually going to look at. The sections called, decoupling the WordPress editor from Gutenberg. And you make the point that at the moment, the block is bound directly to Gutenberg, you know, there’s an inextricable link between them. And they need to be decoupled. And the block protocol sits firmly in the middle. Is there a lot of work that would need to be done there in your estimation? Does that feel like a huge leap that would happen anytime soon, were this all be pushed forward?

[00:34:12] Leonardo Losoviz: I think it’s going to be a bit difficult, yes. Not because it is difficult, but because the devil is in the details. You know, I believe this is something that you get completely right, or people will not use it. It has to be perfect. And until you get the level of perfectness, it can take five years, like it took with WordPress editor with full site editing, right? Now, I don’t think that they will take five years, but the idea that something so simple can still be quite difficult. I think that will be the case. Now, why do I say this? One thing is what I was saying is that WordPress right now only cares about WordPress, but once it connects with the book protocol, WordPress will need to care about the world.

So it cannot do whatever it wants to do. It doesn’t have that freedom anymore. It will be constrained by rules. And the block protocol is not set yet. It’s a work in progress actually right now is also a draft. There’s no version one dot zero. So these guys are coming up with it. And the best way that you have to come up with it, I guess if I have in a real use case example, right. So I don’t think they have anything on this sort of, because it is still the idea. So you develop an application, they use the block protocol, you will find problems. Problems that had not foreseen.

So what I want to say with this is, the idea is magnificent. The concept is great, but I believe that as they implement it, they will keep finding challenges to make it really usable for everyone in a way that it makes sense, also. You remember bootstrap, right? Like the CSS framework? When bootstrap came out, every single website that was using bootstrap looked the same way.

You can customize it. You have different colors. Fair enough, but all the websites use the same grid system of 12 columns, and you knew it was a bootstrap website. So for instance, one of the difficult things here will be, how do we use the block protocol to create blocks that allow you to create a website that is still personal, that is still unique. That doesn’t look like every other website out there. So everyone that wants to use the WordPress blocks, they don’t want to look like they’re using the WordPress blocks, possibly. They might not want to look cheap. I gave the example of Mailchimp before. Image if Mainchimp used the WordPress blocks and then Mailchimp looked like a WordPress site? It’s like, hey Mailchimp, come on. You are worth 10 billion USD, what’s going on with you? They have to have personality, and a lot of those things, they would be a bit difficult to come up with. Fine, you can have CSS on top of it, but the components that you have inside the block. So as we said before, a block is basically a component, high-level component that is loading other components.

All of that is fixed inside of the block. If you want to have a different functionality, you will need to add it inside of the block. But you cannot add so much stuff because then the block will be bloated. So then it has to be lean, but you still want to have personality that you have to have a functionality that no other website has, et cetera.

So what I want to say is let’s see, let’s see how well, it goes, but I don’t think it’s going to be easy, to be honest.

[00:37:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It feels like it might be a bit of an uphill struggle. We’d mentioned just before we pressed record on this podcast. To some extent, it brings to mind an XKCD cartoon. I will make sure to link to this in the show notes, but there’s a wonderful cartoon on XKCD where they say the situation is there are currently 14 competing standards. This is ridiculous. We need to develop a universal standard that everybody is covered by that sorts out all use cases. And then soon after that, it says, well, the actual situation after that is, there are now 15 competing standards. And I wonder if we revisited this conversation in a couple of years time, whether or not this would have taken time to move forward, because obviously, you know, the resources to create the Gutenberg project and to push it forward are very limited.

It’s like you say, it took five years to do where we’ve got two so far and I suspect, if we were to rewind to five years ago, the expectation would be that it had gotten a little bit further by then. So I guess I’m just nervous that it might end up being a bit of a dead end possibly and end up consuming a lot of time. The devil, as you say, would be in the detail.

[00:38:51] Leonardo Losoviz: I’m actually hopeful because I think the block protocol is a first attempt to make this. Now it is true, what you are saying XKCD that you have all of the different blocks implemented by different parties, but nobody’s trying to interact with any other block or any other application out there. So this is the first guy who is trying to say, let’s get all the blocks communicating. So in a way, it has credit. Okay, is it not so dire this situation yet? And I’m also quite hopeful because of what happened with Graph QL. That is a specification that, just by complying with the specification, great things may happen.

So what I want to say with this is that the block protocol, you develop it, you put it out there. And you let the community react and they might actually react in ways that you had not foreseen in advance. They can surprise you. You can actually create magic out of this, that you don’t need to coordinate different teams to work together. With the protocol you’re basically working together, and in this case, what you’re actually doing is having WordPress be used by the world outside of WordPress. And at the same time, you have WordPress being able to reach out to code that was not coded for WordPress. So the potential is so good that even though the path ahead may look broken it may look difficult, I think it’s utterly worth pursuing. It depends on the interest from the community. I don’t know if the community is interested to be honest. If you’re from WordPress, maybe there’s not so much for you to gain from this. If all you see is WordPress. If you will have WordPress now, and you only plan to use WordPress forever more. Yeah. Maybe there’s not so much for you. But, if you are open-minded of thinking, hey, unexpected things will happen from this. Then you can get really excited about this. I’m particularly excited myself.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Good. Yeah. That’s great. One of the things you mentioned a little while ago was the fact that at the moment, WordPress is kind of inward facing, you know, the Gutenberg, the output of Gutenburg and all of the things that are inside of Gutenberg. WordPress only needs to worry about WordPress. So, that’s kind of looking inside to what the project needs to achieve for its own goals of democratizing publishing. Do you feel that the fact that if it turned outwards and integrated with the block protocol and thereby had to obey the standards that that brought with it, are there any drawbacks to that? Are there any situations you can imagine where there would be a conflict of interests or things would become more difficult or more time consuming or just not done in a way that they’re done so far? That might cause things to stall.

[00:41:31] Leonardo Losoviz: I think the biggest drawback might be that the world out there doesn’t care about this. And you’re spending your energy. So invite them, to welcome them and nobody cares and nobody comes in and so it was a lot of wasted effort. Of course. I mean, that’s always the case with everything. Like whenever you do an open source project, people may show up or they might not. And therefore for you or the same. The thing is that you have to do it because you have a real use case, that if you’re going to do it, it’s because you know that you will benefit.

If this is just a proposition that you think, okay, this looks good. Let’s try and invest a lot of energy to invite others to come in. And then the community out there, they’re like, yeah, I don’t care WordPress, and I’m happy with what I’m using right now. You know, they moved on to different technologies and you’re trying to convince others and they don’t care then. Yeah, I think that, that’s the biggest issue that if we’re going to do this, there has to be a clear cut use case for WordPress to benefit. Now I did try to say many, several use cases in there in my article, but of course, I mean I’m and dreaming of sorts. If you have an application that can reuse blocks across two different technologies, for instance, WordPress and something else and you already had that. So for instance, okay, you have a technology, a company like Stripe that they need to cater to different technologies, they cater to PHP and they cater to JavaScript, to Go and to everything else because they provide APIs to connect with them and they have an interface or they maybe have different applications powered by different technologies.

Then they will certainly benefit. So we need to be sure that when we go for, forward with this idea, that we have a real use case that we wanted and that we’re not trying to impress all the time to somebody and then they don’t get excited. They don’t come in and, it was wasted effort. I think that’s the biggest potential drawback. Conflict of interest that you mentioned.

I don’t know. I don’t think so. I haven’t thought about it, but Matt Mullenweg way was to make the open web open, open, open. Just now, he created, he bought the Openverse. Yeah. Yeah. So you might actually think conflict of interest. Yeah. I’m sure he will have conflict of interest that doesn’t stop him. As in if he has to give something for free, that will compete with some paid commercial product, or there, he will do it anyway.

I cannot think of a conflict of interest in this case, but I don’t think that that would be a reason enough to know to not do it. At least based on previous experiences.

[00:44:14] Nathan Wrigley: When we’re recording this, which is in March 2022, as far as I’m aware, there’s been no more public outpourings of whether this will go on. The debates, not debate, but the Twitter thread that was begun between Matt and Joel, I don’t think it’s been updated too much. Do you have any insight or is it exactly where we were a couple of weeks ago?

[00:44:36] Leonardo Losoviz: Yeah, I don’t have any insight. I believe that we are where we were, yeah. I wrote the article on this Smashing in part to try to start this conversation with the community, and yeah, they need to take it up.

I actually, I keep checking the block protocol, the project on the website. They are still developing it, but once again, it’s still a draft. So you can expect this to take a long time, many months still. So this might actually be slow and it ,might be a slow and steady process. I believe.

[00:45:11] Nathan Wrigley: Well, so be it, if that’s the way it needs to be. Really really interesting project. You’ll find all of the links that we mentioned in the show notes.

You also talked about the fact that it would be nice to get this conversation begun. That’s why you wrote the piece. With that in mind, is there anywhere that you make yourself available? Perhaps a Twitter account or some email address or public facing website? Is there a particular place that you would like to mention where we could find you?

[00:45:39] Leonardo Losoviz: Right. Yeah, my Twitter is my surname, which is Losoviz, and my personal website is leoloso dot com. And then my plugin is Graph QL dash API dot com. And then, yeah, basically I’m always around, and I like email, I’m not so, I’m not so big on social media myself. I don’t participate so much. You will not see me really on Twitter.

But if you send an email to me, which you can do through my personal website, I will certainly reply.

[00:46:10] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much Leonardo for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

[00:46:15] Leonardo Losoviz: Okay, thanks so much, Nathan. Very, very happy that you invited me.