
Open Source Design: Can Non-Devs Contribute to Open Source Software Projects? - chrissiebrodgan
http://carsonified.com/blog/uncategorized/open-source-designers-chrissie-brodigan-jjomedia
======
cmelbye
In general, it doesn't seem like designers have much of am interest to do
design work for free for open source projects. This is unfortunate, because it
means that many open source projects that look rather horrible and are
unusable. I think any open source project would be very receptive to a
designer looking to help out.

~~~
vitovito
I'm not so sure that "any open source project would be very receptive." The
ethos of design is very different from that of open-source development and
they are, perhaps, incompatible.

There's the example about putting every option in there as a user preference
instead of making a decision or alienating a vocal user or developer. This
even came up in the iPhone 4 reception UI "bar height" discussion: someone
said to just make it a preference, and someone immediately said that's not the
Apple way, which is true, but it's really _not the way you design well_ in
general.

For a designer to contribute to an open source project, there would have to be
developers committed to implementing the work, to work on "polish" and "froofy
things" instead of "real features" and other "important things." That's a hard
nut to swallow, and what volunteer project owner will ask all their volunteer
contributors to, please, stop working on your pet projects within this
codebase and let's actually cut features and work on UI and usability and
design?

Drupal is a great example. Acquia and/or the Drupal Association hired
professional designers to redesign drupal.org _two years ago_ but no-one in
the community was interested in implementing the theme to completion or doing
the work necessary to roll it out to the live sites. It _might_ get done later
this year, finally, as they've decided to actually hire people to do the work.

Drupal 7 is another example. Designers hired, but no takers on the complete
implementation. Only portions of it made into Drupal 7.

I've personally dealt with this twice, trying to contribute new logos to open-
source projects. One was using a trademarked character as their mascot (IP
infringement), and they spent a couple of years discussing it before deciding
to not do anything about it at all. The other spent only a year discussing it
before it was decided upon, against the very vocal protests of a major
contributor.

I would wager that as most of the developers of any given open source project
are not representative of its end-users, the developers wouldn't even be
involved in the design process in the first place. You can't design by
committee, only take into account the needs of the stakeholders, and if you
don't actually use the software, you might not be at that table. The designer
would, essentially, only be generating work for them.

That said, I'm sure most junior designers would love to have "real clients" to
work with, to get that vital experience, I'm just not sure many open source
projects would actually be able to field them.

------
stcredzero
Documentation. This is often done, but there's not always as much as it there
should be. There's all sorts. Reference documentation. API docs. How-
to/cookbooks. Beginner tutorials. Also, all of the above can come in
developer-oriented and user-oriented flavors.

------
nickpinkston
A reason open source might work better for coding than design is due ego.
Coders are known for their contributions to code which can be reused and
praised over-and-over.

Designers on the other hand are known for their great designs that can't be
reused. Their are styles/techniques, but rarely are they known by ego
reference. Therefore, designers have a great ego interest in developing things
designer praise - that's probably not esoteric open source projects.

