Laurence starts her day at around 6 AM. I’ll keep an eye on Marion for a bit, and begin my workday a little later.

Have you seen the new stats updates on your Unsplash profile yet?

If not, you should see it soon (Edit: as of this morning, February 19th, 2020, it’s currently rolled out to a subset of Unsplash accounts.)

Experiencing FOMO? Don’t! Those subscribed to the newsletters are already receiving most of the info that the new stats page shows:

The Monthly Stats email pretty much sums up everything we need to know about our performance on Unsplash: How many views, and downloads did I hit? Is that number good or bad? How does it compare to the rest of the Unsplash contributors?

The “You made it to the Unsplash Editorial feed” email notifies us when one of our photos makes it to the homepage. …

We’re living in a new age of design where anything goes. And I’m thinking we should take advantage of it.

Too many times I’ve psyched myself out from posting new ideas — too focused on the form, on the style. Too critical of the quality of my own work. Too concerned by what others would think of it: Not good enough, I’d think to myself.

I sit back and witness the volume of work being shared, all types of things. I’m envious; in part by the quality of their work but especially in their ability to hit “publish.” Done. …

Every story has to start somewhere. Ours happens to start with Dropbox.

The premise was simple: To release 10 free photos every 10 days. Every time you downloaded a photo on our site, we’d redirect you to the high-resolution photo… hosted on a public Dropbox folder.

Dropbox wasn’t exactly aware of what we were doing. And to be fair, we weren’t sure neither. After all, it was a quick afternoon project. We figured if only a handful of people could find Unsplash useful, it’d be worth it.

But a handful grew to a few thousand real quick (50,000 to be exact). Our site literally blew up. And if it wasn’t for the good people at, you guessed it, Dropbox, who knows if Unsplash would’ve survived the afternoon. …

Photo Walks. Even the places you visit thousands of times become new to you the moment you have a camera in your hand. As you make your way from location to location, you surprise yourself looking up more often than usual, attentive to the scenes forming around you, hoping to capture that special something.

I’ve always preferred the works of street photographers. There’s something honest about their work that I seem to be drawn to: It’s not trying to be anything else than what it is. It’s straightforward. It’s relatable. …

We’re very fortunate to be designers in tech today. We could spend hours just thinking about problems and spend just as much time coming up with a thousand and one solutions.

There are times when we fire up Sketch and spend days just iterating; where designs for layout 1 is as valid of a solution as the designs for layout 6. And we convince ourselves a file named photo_submission-v6.5-cd-final.sketch is really the final one (but we all know it isn’t ever).

There are also the times when, well, time is not on our side. Here, we design something quick-quick (or QQ as we like to refer to it) as temporary solutions — to get things done. We vow to get back to it later (we don’t) until we ultimately accept that they become core features of the site. …

It’s Tuesday, April 18th, 2017. I’m seated at my desk in one of the most breathtaking workspaces in the world. It’s day 1 for me at Unsplash, and I’m setting up my new laptop.

Every new person joining the Unsplash team goes through the onboarding process: We’re invited to read a few Medium posts like Unsplash’s history & the history of photography, join Slack rooms, set up your dev environment and even ship something on day 1.

As a designer, especially for someone who was already very familiar with the Unsplash platform, I came to work with a list of things I wanted to change. …

It’s no secret that many of us designers resort to using images we find on the web to complete mockups. For one, it helps our clients visualize what their websites could look like “with real content.”

While the use of these images are only ever meant to be temporary, especially when using copyrighted images, I’ve had a few unpleasant surprises of seeing sites I’ve designed go live with images still with their watermarks: A huge fail on my part.

This happened once or twice back when I first started designing for web. And while I’ve never had any issues designing layouts in early versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, I dreaded the days I had to handoff my .psd or .ai …