Seems like it's a good pre-filter. The designers who do know Jekyll are likely to be pretty good and well rounded. If they only required HTML, you might end up with a bunch of guys that think they know design because they're great in Dreamweaver.
Designers these days have to do more than picking the right font and background color. They have to consider different devices, proper i18n, and accessibility. Back in 2002, only knowing html was good enough.
Do any designers want to comment on whether this is a good deal or not? On one hand: featured on ruby-lang.org, on the other hand, it doesn't pay.
While good for inexperienced designers, this seems a little unfair to try and get free work out of people, but I'd be interested to know if designers tend to feel this way or not.
Open source projects thrive on contribution by the community. Ruby doesn't charge people to use it and is largely maintained by a friendly, giving community with a humble 'leader'.
Perhaps labeling the OP as 'is it a good deal' and 'unfair to get free work out of people' is not appropriate in this context. I sure hope that some designers who have benefitted from Ruby (or other open source projects) will step forward to contribute their time to redesign ruby-lang.org -- regardless of 'getting featured' or 'not getting paid'.
A free job for a non-profit is a little less bad, as presumably the motivation is to help the non-profit, rather than to make money. That said, a free contest is going to waste a lot of effort.
Designers make unsolicited redesigns for shits and giggles all the time. I've had jobs interviews from startups that asked me to redesign a portion of their site and I had to give up rights for them to use it if they chose to (they will claim it's in case their internal designers already came up with something similar but it's completely unethical). Ruby-lang.org on the other hand isn't profiteering off the work of designers. This will appeal to a niche crowd though - designers aren't going to be super familiar with the site and generally don't like working for free, even if it's for a bit of publicity.
I wonder if they'd allow the "name at the bottom of the site" to be a link, given that the grand prize here is personal exposure (as well as a warm fuzzy feeling for helping the project I guess).
Not sure how I feel about this one. Design contests suck, and don't even work that well generally, but open source contributions obviously aren't the same as free spec work. Why not put out a redesign call and get a few designers working as a team from the ones who respond?
This isn't very useful, unfortunately. There aren't any requirements for this. All it says is "come up with a design!" This is about as useful as saying "Write something about any subject!"
Has there been any pre-discussion on this? Where did this come from?
I have to say, at first glance this might feel like spec work, but it really isn't.
This isn't any different from what developers and all the other people put in to building and maintaining open-source projects such as this.
And especially being a developer myself, I believe that a lot of open-source projects can really use some love when it comes to visual design and UX, even big well known projects like Gimp can use some of that love.
This seems ridiculous. They want a good designer willing to work for free, AND they must know an obscure Ruby CMS?
Here's an idea: Just require the designer to know HTML, then you guys make it work with Jekyll. You're the Rubyists, after all.