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Automattic Swag 2021: Wapuu Lion Dance

March 6, 2021 9:18 pm

In Automattic, we usually have yearly announcements of new designs or products for our swag/merchandise. For 2021, the swag is a little bit special to me — mostly because I involved in one of the sticker series design.

Introducing: Lion Dance Wapuu.

Lion Dance Wapuu sticker design

This is actually a project that started as a joke. One of my teammates prepared her sabbatical leave that started during the Chinese New Year so we chatted about Chinese New Year celebrations and one of folks on the team channel mentioned, “Wapuu in lion dance costume would be super cute.”

As soon as I heard the comment, I did a really fast and rough sketch. Wapuu is fairly easy to draw because it fits all my character preferences: Round and chonk. Also, I really like drawing lion dance costume. After what happened in 2020 (and still going on in 2021,) I felt it would be pretty neat to bring a little bit of cheer.

The original sketch

I shared it on one of the office’s public Slack channel — Asiamatticians channel — and everyone shared really good responses. I was content at that time. I was pretty happy.

Then, my colleague from Marketing division mentioned me. “Hey, I pinged you on the Events’ Slack channel. Seems like everyone like it very much and they want to make it a sticker.”

“Are you serious.”

“YES!”

I worked together with folks from my team, Events division, and Designs division. We chatted, joked, and shared insights on the origin of Chinese zodiac, the process of making the vector version of Wapuu, and the colors. It was a really awesome experience, to work cross-division like that. It wasn’t a super major project, but it has been really motivating and refreshing encounter.

And now I have the stickers!

Aside from Wapuu Lion Dance, we also have Wapuu Year of the Ox! Check them out on Mercantile store!
K.K. Bossa

March 3, 2021 5:06 pm

“K.K. Bossa” is one of my favorite songs in Animal Crossing: New Horizon (despite the in-game lyrics is actually only “meeep mop meep moop weewaaweewooo mop meep moooooop”) so I’m pleasantly surprised to hear the, uh, human-lyrics version.

(Featured image is when I visited fellow Automattician’s island through Dream Address. Thank you for sharing your dream address island, Melanie!)
There will be time they returned and said, “ONE MORE TIME”

February 23, 2021 5:56 pm

For the sleepless nights filled with the EDM music, cigarettes, and black coffee with neverending projects, thesis, and freelance works. For the late-night PHP and CSS tests, despairs, and joys. For the late-night walk home with MP3 player on the pocket. Midnight stroll — because there was no bus left — on Jalan Sudirman, Jakarta. Jacket pulled up, cap pulled down.

For the company during heartbreaks and falling in love.

One more time.
On being mistaken

February 19, 2021 4:52 pm

A bit of backstory for context: In my culture (Indonesian/asian,) the elders usually say, “let them be. Once they got their own taste of medicines, they will stop doing it,” whenever a young child acted up/refused to listen. For example, a child jumped on a sofa. The elders usually say, “let them be. Once they fall, they know that it hurts and they’ll stop doing it.”

I was mistaken on my youngest daughter.

She fell down from her brother’s bunkbed (she’s 4 years old and I think she’s living up to her name: Rey. Yes, that Rey from Star Wars) because she slipped and missed a step; her cheek is now purple because of the bruises.

“They’ll know it hurts and they’ll stop doing it.”

…

30 minutes later, a shouting match ensued. The big brother yelled, “NO! You can’t be careless! I don’t want you to climb again and– and– try to hang upside down! No! You have to be careful!”

His words got cut off by a sound that I can safely say a mix of pterodactyl got trapped inside a refrigerator and vicious geese attacking me when I was a wee little girl, walked home from school.

When we found out her room now has her art masterpiece in form of mural
ProPhoto RGB v. sRGB color space

February 11, 2021 11:28 pm

I’m curious. I need to jot this down and maybe reroute back to this post once I have time and once I have unfortunate developer to bug on the office.

Recently, I noticed an uptick of color display questions from users that contacting us. The question always the same:

“Why do my pictures look dull on the phone?”

This is a really interesting situation. The images look good and vibrant on the desktop/laptop, but once you check the website on the phone — bam — the dullest color.

The cause is actually this:

sRGB vs Adobe RGB vs ProPhoto RGB: Color Spaces Explained

TL;DR images with ProPhoto RGB will definitely have duller look on mobile phones, especially on iPhones. To rectify it, you will need to export your images to sRGB format.

But! Please indulge me on this. But! Here’s what makes me curious: Most — if not all — of the users who ask the color display question is non-professional/they are not professional photographers/designers/illustrators.

They upload the images to their websites/blogs just like any other regular folks — Add image, or drag-and-drop, and that’s it. They didn’t do any heavyweight image editing prior uploading their images.

Then it happened to me just now. The previous post has some images with so many details, and I swear the red color on the pictures is really vivid and bold.

I opened my WP for iOS app, then uploaded the images using Image block. Finished the post, then published.

I have side by side comparison. The one on the left is the picture on my Photos app, the one on the right is the picture on my live site (Chrome mobile.)

I also able to confirm I didn’t do any adjustments on my iPhone’s settings.

I’m curious. Something must have happened; I’m thinking a change on how iOS processed the images (??? Maybe???) Also, it seems like this happens on mobile display only. The images look okay on desktop.

Tomorrow, I’m going to check the image profile and see what color space the image is.

Update:

The color space is RGB… ? (None of both possibilities LOL)

I would agree with Ditaa. Most probably iOS automatically compress picture for mobile devices and the differences just becoming more noticeable recently.

Quick blurbs

I rarely saved post drafts when writing a blog post because I usually able to ramble in a short period of time, until today, I decided to write about how I designed this blog (sidebar, cute background, pixel-thingy, and the likes.) Suffice to say, it’s, uh, long. My dormant Happiness Engineer-soul came back in full force, hahahah!

I’m still working on it. Hopefully, I can publish it by this evening (Malaysia timezone).

May 2, 2026