Im a designer and I would be happy to contribute to open source projects. contact johnatjohncozendotcom if interested.
Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
101–110 of 251 posts
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#102Why I don't contribute to open-source projects: I feel like a second-class citizen around developers. And I don't want to venture in to the lions den. After all, I "just make things pretty", right? I hate politics. Many open-source projects are a power-struggle with entrenched developers guarding against change. Design is all about visual relationships. Making a change to one small aspect to the design effects everyt…
Sometimes, I think that the only way to integrate them into a FOSS project is to have one lead designer who has ownership over the design and to have the coders work with that.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#103During my day job I play the lone designer in an organization built from day one with only software engineers. I suspect the problems that I face there are similar to the problems faced by designers in OSS. 1. Communication. Developers use a completely different language than designers. If I come in talking about alignment, developers are thinking 'right left or center justified?' When developers start talking about…
In the intrest of bi-lingual education could you explain what you mean when you come in talking about alignment? Developer here, and I would definitely be thinking 'right, left, center'?
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you mention GIMP, that's one OSS program that needs a UI refresh badly.
I disagree. I, against popular opinion, like Gimp's UI a lot. It just feels natural to me.
Same, especially on Linux where I can just give it its own workspace, the lack of container window isn't a problem.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#1051. Ask for help - I'm a designer that reads HN everyday and I wouldn't know where to look if I wanted to participate in an open source project. Is there a list? The problem is most OS software aside from GIMP/Inkscape doesn't make its way in front of designers often. 2. Make it discrete - What needs to be designed? The entire UI and workflows? The application icon? The internal navigation glyphs? Redesigning an entir…
Funny you mention GIMP, that's one OSS program that needs a UI refresh badly.
On that note: I thought that Inkscape was really cool until I tried Blender. The UI experience for Blender is hundreds of times easier because many of the things that you have to do regularly (like scrolling back and forth) are shortcuts.
Not to derail the conversation too much, but Inkscape also needs some improvement where UI is concerned, many things that should be easy are not.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, maybe we should make designers want to use Git. I use Git, and its a wonderful piece of software craft indeed, but it does not have Windows/Mac clients, that designers often use, as their base OS. A decent usable frontend for Git, on platforms other than Linux too, needs to be developed, for it to be usable by designers. Edit - I meant to say officially supported frontend and support for other os…
> Git [...] does not have Windows/Mac clients Since the target group were designers, the presenter used a Mac, and tried to do everything using a GUI client for Git. I don't remember which one he used, but it ran natively on the Mac and it looked quite nice. (Still, the presenter sometimes struggled with that GUI. He was obviously more used to the command line.)
Most git actions don't need a deep understanding of Git nor a full GUI to function. I think git gui and gitx probably are enough to get a designer going.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#107I really wish I knew how to get great designers... VLC is a product, that is widely used, usable (not the mac version, though), but it is extremely ugly. It is quite hard to get designers to help us (redesigning all the buttons for example) for quite many reasons. The biggest reason is that we don't speak the same language. Many designers don't understand the criticism that usually comes around with each modification…
Also, many (not all of them) designers don't understand the difficulties of usability, and sometimes mistakes it with "shiny". Usability of a desktop application is way more complex than a website[...]
I think usability is a blend of user experience, usefulness and intuitiveness. I have a hard time associating the latter with either the programmer or the designer.
My experience, as a programmer working often with designers, is that many of them (not all) are more concerned with the visual appeal of an interface and to a lesser extent its intuitiveness and usefulness.
For example, I've built quite a number of web management systems. Most times, when I team up with some designer they'd want to make pretty icons. However, I've come to the realization that we get more praises when the client can just look at his system and recognizes what he asked us to build and can easily guess where to go next. And that more often happens with text buttons. I believe that visual cues have their place, but I also think that many graphic memes have gone beyond useful, which probably doesn't help the relationship between programmers and designers.
On the other hand, I remember a time when I would build some quick ass functionality, but presented in such a convoluted way that only other programmers could understand the prowess and usefulness of the feature. You had to get up up early to get me to change them!
Programmers tend to be very minimalist, whereas designers are often very expressive. I think there is an effort to be made on both parts to reach a middle-ground. Designers need to learn that pretty doesn't necessarily mean useful. And programmers need to realize that just because their work is useful doesn't warrant that it's usable.
There's hope though. In time I've learned and now strive to make features as intuitive as possible. I now also favor very pretty, text-only, icons.
[...]and the current trend of "removing functionalities" is not always welcomed by developers...
In my not so humble opinion, graphic interfaces should be designed with the Pareto principle as a guideline (80-20 rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle). Is the feature useful? Yes. Will it be used often? No. Lets put it in the "nice to have" list.
If the application caters to a broad audience with varying levels of expertise and usage, it should present interfaces with varying degrees of complexity. I've seen this applied in real life successfully (e.g. in Ubuntu: dpkg >> apt >> aptitude >> Software Center). I definitely agree with you though, that too many software nowadays try to make things too easy without offering a way to go beyond the basics.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand what you're saying…but as an open-source contributor I certainly expect that my code can be modified for various reasons. I guess a “work of art” would feel more personal, and (unless given a tight spec of elements that must be included) is more of a candidate for either rejection or admission as-is. For changes I'd certainly expect a request “can you add a wizard hat on the ninja?” rather than someone m…
Yes, but. Imagine you wrote a piece of code and then spent a couple of hours optimizing it to remove various bottlenecks etc etc. You submit the patch, it sits there for a couple of days, then a designer (bear with me) comes along, takes a look, cuts out your optimisations to "simplify the code" and applies the patch. You'd feel pretty rejected.
Indeed, it's also a matter of actual vs imagined competency. What is the point of contributing to a project if someone with an outsized notion of their range of skills can come in and botch up previous work?
The issue is whether the person modifying or reiterating a work is competent to do so; We hear all about it with programming, but there is such a thing as "cargo cult design" too.
Also, I don't see it as whether a specific design contribution is "a work of art", with all its associated assumptions of involubility; in this context design is ever changing according to the evolution of a project.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#109We don't get anyone to contribute to open sours project, not only designers, but also business type, docs guys etc. Because, most of these guys actually have a life and a family to feed and will not do suck enormous stupidity to dabble with open source, let alone contribute to it.
Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
#110[deleted]