Getting Designers into Open Source

Design Lounge Communication and collaboration
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Hi everyone,

I am koha and I have been having terrible nightmares lately. But I won’t talk about the nightmares here, instead, I’d share a project I whimsically believe could be a contribution to the effort to get designers into open source.

I had a eureka moment about a month ago - I think.

When starting out as a designer, I had to design concept projects, Identify problems and perhaps offer a usable solution. That’s just me in a horde of designers out there already working on random ideas. Even at this stage, all this is done in isolation.

The same goes for budding developers; the struggle to build portfolios leads many down the path of the to-do list app and the never-old calculator app. They build this project without any form of design guide. Most do.

What if things could be done differently? Just a tad bit different.

After days of headbanging, I landed on something.

Factory()
What if there was a place designers can submit designs and a developer can also access them, build them, and add this to their portfolio. The designer also would be able to refer to a live project no matter its size in his/her/their portfolio.

And since my drive was to encourage open source contributions, Github was the place I thought about first.

I scaffolded a dummy sample of how this might look like while ideating but I would love inputs from the community. Hence this elaborate and boring write-up.

Here’s the link:
kohasummons/Factory

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I’ve been lately also thinking about a ‘Github for artist and designers’
I kinda feel you are hinting on this with your proposal.

A place where ppl can share designs and mayeb even work on them together.

I will look in to your project :slight_smile:

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Hello xox,

I love the response my brain felt when i read your reply. The platform idea kinda rock. Designers would be much more abstracted from the code and focus on conversations that hinge on design, right?

That said, my decision to use Github in my initial proposal was based on a few things:

  1. I dare say 85% of opensource projects live on github. Getting users familiar with github while just submitting whimsical looking designs would encourage them to dive into deeper seas.

  2. Single source of truth. Since Github is sorta like the skater boy of opensource. Most of the pipeline that currently exist features Github in there somehow. So I got a nudge to host this project on github rather than another tooling.

  3. This one is kinda selfish, I needed to get my foundation steady using github, and get a deeper understanding of how git flows.

Yet, I believe you have a awesome idea going here,

How do you see it working? Do you have sketches or so? I’m just curious to hear about this. This is lit.