/resources

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

Resources

The most important thing about designing in open source is communication. 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

  • pen & paper for mockups. No hi-fi photoshop work needed – when we have non-interactive mockups for an interactive medium, pen & paper does the trick.
  • 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 ownCloud 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

Icons

Fonts

Frameworks

  • Bootstrap Fully featured mature HTML, CSS (LESS) & Javascript
  • Foundation Fully featured mature HTML, CSS (Sass) & Javascript
  • Rebar Simple lightweight HTML, CSS (LESS)

Reads

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