Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects? • Hacker News Board

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#221

Post by pyre » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 7:39 AM UTC

jrwoodruff wrote: post #95

During 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…

  > 7. Bad designers. Oh yea, there's -a few- of us out there
  > that just picked up GIMP yesterday and think a
  > 600 x 600px favicon should be fine. Even designers
  > capable of really good work may not understand why
  > a 2400x1600 image cannot be used thumbnail-size on
  > the page. This is sad, but I've seen it.

There are a lot of designers that think that there is zero difference between print design and web design. The only difference being sending the finalized design to the printer or the programmers. (I.e. I design in my little corner over here, and poop out my design to you code monkeys that are little more than the automatons that will construct my vision) This may not apply to all or even a majority, but there are good numbers of them out there.

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#222

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 7:56 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #198

Corrado wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to have as few alignment lines as possible? I would think that aligning elements (buttons, form fields, etc.) would be a good thing. Of course, I'm a developer so that may be my problem. :)

If all of your buttons are aligned to one line, that's better than having half aligned to one line and the other half aligned to a different line. If none of your buttons are aligned, then you don't have zero alignment lines, you have as many alignment lines as you have buttons.

[deleted]

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#223

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 8:19 AM UTC

reneherse wrote: post #108

ErrantX wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#224

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 9:02 AM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #220

Corrado wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to have as few alignment lines as possible? I would think that aligning elements (buttons, form fields, etc.) would be a good thing. Of course, I'm a developer so that may be my problem. :)

This is what it mean: http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/images/LightroomVsExpressionBl... This time not from my own blog but from Brandon Walkins

That's a very powerful example. The Expression Blend interface (though it's showing a completely different function) feels very uncomfortable, while the Lightroom interface feels natural inviting. I'm glad to have learned that alignment lines make up a big part of that difference (I also prefer the Lightroom typography).

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#225

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 9:04 AM UTC

minozake wrote: post #92

Andrex wrote: post #46

Earlier 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.

I love the right-click interface in GIMP because it makes almost everything I need to do immediately available. But why on earth don't they sort and/or categorize the tool palette icons?

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#226

Post by ThomPete » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 9:20 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #224

ThomPete wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what it mean: http://brandonwalkin.com/blog/images/LightroomVsExpressionBl... This time not from my own blog but from Brandon Walkins

That's a very powerful example. The Expression Blend interface (though it's showing a completely different function) feels very uncomfortable, while the Lightroom interface feels natural inviting. I'm glad to have learned that alignment lines make up a big part of that difference (I also prefer the Lightroom typography).

I am working on a small book about design for developers. Alignment is one of those things that people often don't really understand (besides left, center and right). Perhaps I should make that section a little bigger.

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#227

Post by oemera » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 9:27 AM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #84

josegonzalez wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're quite wrong. GitX is available at https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx/downloads (Get the experimental branch) Git Tower is available at http://www.git-tower.com/ Textmate has a GIT Bundle at https://github.com/jcf/git-tmbundle (It's quite good, but maybe not for designers). And Giggle ( http://live.gnome.org/giggle ). Windows is the only OS lacking a good client, but I use GitX for Mac every day, as do the les…

Yes, I just picked up git for Windows, and it is atrociously unusable. Brutally atrocious. It's not like Windows is a popular operating system - git shouldn't support it as a first-class citizen. ;)

Git was developed for improving Linux Kernel development. You see why they don't care about Windows, right?

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#228

Post by rimantas » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 9:51 AM UTC

mgunes wrote: post #121

rorrr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design IS optional and isn't as is important as you make it sound. Look at craigslist, hacker news, reddit.

All three are very deliberately designed the way they are, and function well thanks to those designs. Good design is often "as little design as possible", as Dieter Rams' final principle for good design goes; avoiding overdesign is a merit, not a deficiency.

One of may favorite sayings is "Good design is invisible".

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#229

Post by vog » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 10:02 AM UTC

jianshen wrote: post #61

vog wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, maybe we should make designers want to use Git. This might be not as crazy as it sounds, as I recently learned: A few weeks ago, there was a short presentation about Git, targeted at non-programmers such as graphics and web designers. After the presentation, one of the designers (who apparently already knew about Git) stood up and criticized the presenter for not going deeper into branches and auto…

Source control is also not part of a designer's natural workflow because the options aren't that great (usually backups on a NAS is all there is and a few proprietary snapshot plugins from Adobe. Kaleidoscope looks the most interesting). Also, svn branch numbers or git hashes don't make nearly as much sense to designers as "HiFi Mockup iPhone4 Right Aligned Inbox.ai" when they want to backtrack or compare current "in…

> svn branch numbers or git hashes don't make nearly as much sense to designers as "HiFi Mockup iPhone4 Right Aligned Inbox.ai"

That's what the commit comments are for.

BTW, programmers also prefer reading commit comments, commit dates and author names. They don't read hashes. (Although they sometimes copy&paste them because they are short and unique.)

Re: Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?

#230

Post by EnderMB » Mon, Feb 28, 2011, 10:04 AM UTC

I'm a developer with decent design skills and I would love to work on an open-source project in both roles, although I have looked on CodePlex a number of times to see what I could join. I rarely ever see any design openings, and more often than not a lot of solutions in project repositories don't even compile.

It's easy to say that designers are needed, but anyone who has spent time in a design community of any kind would know that there are loads of designers out there that would love to get their stuff out there. I'd love to do design work for a decent open-source project while I get used to the code base to help with the development; I'm willing to bet that many others are in the same boat.