Open Source Design – community of designers and devs for open design processes

UI/UX has seemingly many times been neglected by many open source projects, especially those that are supposed to be for end users that might not be developers themselves. It's easy as a programmer to kind of guess where the functionality should be based on previous experiences (with similar but different software) when you're using it, while many end users don't really think about the patterns and gets a grimmer user experience. This is why we need more designers getting into…

My experience with trying to help open-source projects with design has been quite bad. Projects that most need design help are usually not sponsored by a company, a true contributor project. Design is opinionated, and for many projects it can be hard to find consensus. Much easier to find consensus around adding features. Two very different examples: Blender and Audacity (pre-acquisition). Blender was able to pull off something spectacular with 2.8, a full rethink of UI, controls, even app structure…

I understand and really like the idea of an open design processes, but can't help but feel this encourages working for free and developing spec work. Though maybe I am not understanding it correctly.