Hi everyone!
This is my first post on this forum, I’m following for some time what’s happening and decided first time to post. Sorry if I write something that doesn’t make sense, I really hope that I won’t offend anyone. I’m trying to tell you my experience as new guy, hoping it will help.
As someone who’s trying for some time to get involved in open source design, I must say that it’s a rough path. I don’t want to bother you with my whole journey, but maybe just relevant experience with opensourcedesign.net. I think I found about this website from some conference video from youtube, but I found it early on my journey. I’m so glad that there is this dedicated community that is the jumping board for open source designers, thanks a lot to you all! Here is how it went:
- First I checked articles. It seed like this part of the site is not really taken care of, there are few articles per year, there’s even a gap for year or two. Nothing bad about it, still wort checking. I was a bit disappointed that I only found one article about how to start contributing as a designer. The article is is from 2020, I’m talking about Beginners Guide to OPEN SOURCE Design via Victory Brown’s Hashnode.dev page which directs me to personal blog of the writer. The article is good, but talks in general terms, I didn’t find anything new. It has 3 dead links, I needed to use archive.org in order to see all of them. The article widened my search.
- I checked the job board, great! It’s a list of 20-30 postings, and only few of them on the top are active. In that moment I didn’t find anything that I can contribute to.
- I checked resources. A nice list, but again looks a bit outdated, like Penpot is listed 2 times with different descriptions. There is a list of opensource project which is great, but seems a bit of a random list. Some of the projects have no clear way to contribute with design, some project have something related to design linked (like documentation or design blog). No previews, no search, not much of descriptions except links to dig deeper.
- Then I checked the event, nothing except monthly meetings. Oh, I just missed one again! This time I added it in my calendar. I checked links from the calendar, one dead link, one links takes me to the forum category that has a last post from 2024… Then I asked myself - do they actually meet or this is some forgotten recurring event in the calendar?
- Then I checked the forum, I was delighted to see there are new posts on a weekly base! Until this point I thought this was abandoned project. By chance I found the general topic about monthly calls, and figured out that there is one post where people regularly discuss. So my bad, I didn’t see in a list of old posts there is one that is active. I guess it used to be practice to open new topic for every event, and then it was changed to use only one post.
I subscribed to the news letter, so I get weekly summaries of new comments and posts and I really like it. In the meantime I continued my search and landed on Penpot project that I follow for few years now. Recently I became official ambassador, I’m still new and figuring out how to contribute but I found a way at the end!
I guess most of my complains will be fixed with a new and updated version of the website, I understad that this is already in the process. Here are my 2 ideas on what I think would be useful:
- Make a dedicated page where you have listed all active opensource project that have integrated designers in their workflow somehow. Proposal for things to cover:
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Name of the project
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Short description of the project
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Explanation how designers can contribute (is it marketing, branding, UX design…)
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Important links to the project like design chat room, design documentation, link for a design system or kit, ticketing platform. Every project is different regarding to this.
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If possible connect the project with this forum, are there topics on this, are there designers on the forum that are part of this project.
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Is there someone who can be directly contacted (some project have only this)
So this would be different from Resources “Open source projects” section. I would make clear distinction between opensource project in general, open source projects that need help but there’s no clear way how to do it and projects with clear idea how to contribute as a designer. It would be good to check this list at least once per year and update it, also leave a clear way how can someone add projects to this list.
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- Another thing that I would really like to see is more of the opensource design news. There are many general foss news, but it would be nice to get overview on design related software, events, interviews with open source designers, interviews with teams that explain how they integrate design on their project. Are there new interesting topics on this or related formus. Maybe even a segment where new UX/UI issues are presented from projects that have them like GIMP, InkScape, Blender… For the starters maybe it can be just a monthly news letter.
Thank you all for the good work at opensourcedesign.net!