Michael Arestad
Lead Product Designer at Chromatic (we're hiring!)
Granby, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Arestad is a Lead Product Designer and front-end engineer with 13 years of experience designing and shipping products used by millions, currently leading product design at Chromatic from Granby, Colorado. He blends visual design and hands-on front-end work—contributing to major open-source projects like Gutenberg and Jetpack—to improve UI consistency, accessibility, and discoverability across WordPress’s ecosystem. At Automattic he helped transform Jetpack into a profitable product and built design systems that reduced debt and accelerated prototyping. A long-time WordPress core committer and community organizer, he was among the first designers granted commit access, shaping features that power a significant portion of the web. His work on Storybook and its design system shows a taste for component-driven tooling and thoughtful UI polish, and he also designs and builds independent web products and publications.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., Graphic Design, B.A., Graphic Design at University of Northern ColoradoBachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.), Communications Design, Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.), Communications Design at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design
Github Skills (15)
wordpress10
css10
uid10
responsive-design10
typescript10
javascript10
typescripts10
front-end-development10
ui-design10
gutenberg10
react10
typescript-types10
storybook10
infographics10
html8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
storybookjs/design-system
Jul 2021 - Jan 2023
🗃 Storybook Design System
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 55 commits, 30 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the Storybook Design System by adding and updating various icons. They implemented a new "ComponentDriven" icon and added document illustrations to existing colored icons. Additionally, the user updated the size of icons used in button and form elements and fixed some visual bugs within the user interface.
reactstyled-componentsstorybookdesign-systemtypescript
Automattic/jetpack
Jun 2014 - Oct 2019
Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:372 commits, 179 PRs, 218 pushes in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on updating and refining the front-end styles of the Jetpack plugin. Their contributions included modifying CSS files, such as `jetpack-admin.css` and `jetpack-banners.css`, to adjust the styling of various components and sections. They also addressed layout and visual inconsistencies, such as padding, spacing, and alignment, to create a more polished and responsive user interface. Furthermore, the user refactored CSS and applied specific class names, and made the 'Dashboard' navigation item translatable.
reactexpertswordpressphpsecurity
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