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I think everyone will benefit from UX contributions.





Yeah, but trying to contribute design work to FOSS projects sucks— firstly, a whole lot of project maintainers think that UX and UI design hurt usability because they “dumb things down” to make them look pretty. Secondly, the workflows for code and design are completely different — you just can’t break design work down into a long series of modular pull requests like you can with code. I’ve encountered very few maintainers that don’t see that as a fundamental shortcoming of design and designers rather than a plug that needs a different adapter. Either way, you do a ton of upfront work for people that are suspicious of your motives and assume you’re incompetent, and it will either get totally ignored, or rejected out of hand. I’ve contributed somewhere on the order of 5 figures in coding hours to various FOSS projects and have a degree in design, and I still only contribute pure code features to FOSS projects.

I’m quite pleased to see that Gimp has undertaken this commendable step.




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