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Manuel Esposito

Product Designer at ElmaStudio Ltd.

@manuelesposito Whangārei, Aotearoa New Zealand joined Sep 2018

elmastudio.de/en Slack: @Manuel Esposito

    Bio

    Designer and co-founder of ElmaStudio, which I run together with my partner Ellen. I believe the best design is the one you don’t notice, which makes it very hard to show off. My favourite design tool is the delete key. These days I spend most of my time on new projects and a lot of AI experiments, especially local AI that runs on your own machine and keeps your data where it belongs, with you. I like technology that is calm, honest and just a little bit magical. When I’m not at the screen, I’m probably looking at art.

    Interests

    Good typography, long reads on the web, travel, the 80s (the music, the films, maybe not the haircuts), comics and art.

    WordPress Origin Story

    • 2009: Ellen and I built our first WordPress sites for clients, and somehow never stopped.
    • We started writing about WordPress on elmastudio.de, in German, sharing what we learned (and what broke).
    • Our first free themes came out in 2011 and 2012, and our first premium theme in 2012.
    • More than 30 themes followed. Some of them are probably still out there, quietly doing their job.
    • When blocks arrived, we went all in: the AinoBlocks plugin in 2019 and the Aino block theme in 2021.
    • Somewhere along the way we moved to Aotearoa New Zealand, which turns out to be a very good place to think about design.
    • Today the blog speaks German and English, and is about AI as much as WordPress.
    • Next up: Architrave, a new theme that is almost ready, and plenty of AI experiments.

    Badges

    CODE
    1 badge
    Plugin Developer

    Current Job

    Product Designer
    Present
    ElmaStudio Ltd.

    Recent impact

    Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

    Last 30 days
    4contributions
    high4
    medium0
    score12
    Last 90 days
    4contributions
    high4
    medium0
    score12
    Last 12 months
    4contributions
    high4
    medium0
    score12

    Contributions

    Type
    October 2026
    Oct 11 Sun · 06:47
    Plugins high
    Committed [3739000] to Plugins SVN:
    Vibetiles 0.56.40
    Oct 09 Fri · 07:02
    Plugins high
    Committed [3736076] to Plugins SVN:
    Page art and screenshots
    Oct 09 Fri · 04:16
    Plugins high
    Committed [3735853] to Plugins SVN:
    Vibetiles 0.56.10
    September 2026
    Sep 28 Mon · 16:52
    Themes med
    Created ticket #293204 on Themes Trac:
    THEME: Architrave – 1.4.0

    Developer

    1 plugin