/resources

:bookmark: How to get street cred as a designer in open source projects.

Resources

Are you a designer interested in doing open source design or simply seeing what open source can offer you to work on your non-open source projects? Look no further. Here is a collection of great tools, libraries, reading material, and media for you to use, for free (as in cost), while you spread the free (as in freedom) love of open source design!

  • Projects - list of open source projects with an attenion to design
  • People - list of designers who work heavily on open source projects and tools

Are you a developer looking for a designer? Consider posting to our jobs board.

Designers are not only designers who finish a concept and »hand it off« to developers who implement it – that won’t happen. The key is continuous dialog with the people who could implement it, small steps, incremental improvements and documenting your designs clearly so it’s understandable why the changes you propose are better than the current state.

Tools

  • Use a pen & paper for mockups and prototypes. No hi-fi Photoshop work needed.
  • Design discussion on the issue tracker of the project. For example at GitHub – get an account, identify design issues, participate, and open new issues. Establish a »Design« tag on the tracker to group these issues, for example like in the Nextcloud issues.
  • If you want to dive into the code (awesome!) just check on the project page how to set up a development environment and get going.

Material

Images

Inspiration

Icons

  • The Noun Project CC and purchasable icons
  • IcoMoon CC icons and free to use icon-font creation software.
  • Pictogramas Open source free icons for personal and commercial purposes
  • ToIcon All icons are licensed under a Creative Commons
  • Inkscape Open Symbols Open source icon sets to use as Inkscape symbols
  • IconMonstr A large collection of glyph icons from a German artist. Free to use without attribution and free to modify

Fonts

CSS Frameworks

  • Bootstrap Fully featured mature HTML, CSS (LESS) & Javascript
  • Foundation Fully featured mature HTML, CSS (Sass) & Javascript
  • BASCSS Lightning-Fast, Modular CSS for Designers
  • Bourbon A simple and lightweight mixin library for Sass
  • Kickoff A lightweight front-end framework for creating scalable, responsive sites
  • Space Base A sass-based responsive css framework
  • Rebar Simple lightweight HTML, CSS (LESS)

General Design Reads

Open Source and Design Reads

Searching The Creative Commons

Learn to Code

Focused on HTML, CSS, Javascript.) Ideally, to be able to implement your own suggestions. But also to better discuss with developers and be understand why and how certain things work and don’t work.

Learn to Design

Learn about design concepts!

Other nice stuff