Contributing design to open source
Last year I’ve been trying to focus more on design. Specifically, I’ve been enjoying working on logo and website design. I’ve developed a few logos for local businesses, a local Meetup, a startup and a café, to name a few.
This summer I wanted to keep working on those skills, but didn’t have any active projects. Roaming the internets I bumped into the job board from Open Source Design.
Open Source Design is a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open source software.
https://opensourcedesign.net/
On the OSD job board there are not only job listings but also people asking for design contributions (free and paid). It’s really useful for designers who want to contribute to open source, but maybe are not comfortable using GitHub and opening pull requests.
Also it’s very interesting for those who want to improve their design skills in a more relaxed way. You get a real life client with a real project, but you will probably have more flexible delivery dates, less expectations and the pressure of money is gone.
With that said, it’s crucial to understand that even though there’s probably no money involved, this is real work. You should be responsive, kind, empathetic, responsible. In one word: professional.
My experience
Reading through the OSD job board is how I reached out to Nikita, who was looking for a logo for the dotenv-linter Python library. I sent him an email and we were quickly working on it.
I showed him a few paths to follow and once we were decided we pursued it, refining and iterating over it.
After a few days, this is was the final work:
Designing for a development library is not the same as doing a logo (let alone branding) for a proper business. That involves much more investigation, more thinking, asking more questions, making mockups, producing more collaterals and so on.
However, this was also an interesting experiment on how you could adapt your process to each client.