Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

1. Ask for help - I'm a designer that reads HN everyday and I wouldn't know where to look if I wanted to participate in an open source project. Is there a list? The problem is most OS software aside from GIMP/Inkscape doesn't make its way in front of designers often.

2. Make it discrete - What needs to be designed? The entire UI and workflows? The application icon? The internal navigation glyphs? Redesigning an entire app that has tens or hundreds of contributors can be daunting, but getting someone started with something small can be a gateway.

3. Leave it alone - One of the other commenters mentioned how a designer contributed something and then it was overwritten and ruined. Typically you don't want to have dozens of designers all working on a project unless there are fairly strict guidelines to work from. Have a working group at the beginning that can set the UI tone and create guidelines from that. Also a small review committee to review changes is smart, just as they do for code.

4. Version Control for Dummies - Put together a short explanation of how to use the version control system of choice, assuming no knowledge beyond Photoshop. Or find someone on the technical side who can be an intermediary/GIT trainer. The human part of this is very important.

Do those things and you should see prettier projects in the future. I know I'd love to get involved, but have no idea where to get started!

Funny you mention GIMP, that's one OSS program that needs a UI refresh badly.

They've had something going since at least February '07 (going by the refresh wiki edit history), but I don't see any sign that it's produced a tangible product.

Lots of pretty mockups though.

I disagree. I, against popular opinion, like Gimp's UI a lot. It just feels natural to me.

Same, especially on Linux where I can just give it its own workspace, the lack of container window isn't a problem.

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?

I have not really seen any evidence of GIMP being that poor of a UI. The biggest complaint is the multi-window interface for which single-window mode is currently in alpha and should be out in a few months or so.

It's a little clumsy if you're working with two images on one screen (especially when drawing/painting with references). A single-window interface has a menu option that lets you tile them.

I'll be happy when the single-window version is released.

most complaints about gimp's multi-window UI are really complaints about window management.

window management should be handled by the window manager, not by each application.

That may absolve the app of responsibility, doesn't make the UI any better though.

There's a lot of duplication (Colors, Tools>Color Tools; Brush in Toolbox & as Dockable window), things that are out of place (View>Show Grid, Image>Configure Grid), common workflows that require more clicks than in other editors (Select-Copy-DeSelect-Paste), odd choice of defaults (When resizing canvas, choose "resize all layers" instead of "None"), and other odd design choices (Toolbox can't be a dockable window, Toolbox needs scrollbar if vertical Resolution<1024) that make GIMP occasionally frustrating to use, despite being an otherwise awesome tool.

Which is strange because any app that can operate on more than one document at the same time opens a separate window for each document on OS X. Even Photoshop. This works well on OS X because of how OS X manages applications. Let's for a moment consider GIMP if it was a native OS X application.

First, to switch between different applications, OS X just uses application switching whereas Windows and GNOME/KDE use window switching. IMO, window switching is a terrible design decision because it clutters the application switcher and the taskbar/dock and breaks operations that should logically apply to entire applications (quit, hide, Exposé etc.) Another desktop OS that uses application switching instead of window switching is Haiku (a BeOS descendant). Anyhow, if GIMP ran on OS X, you wouldn't need to sift through a bunch of separate windows when you wanted to focus on GIMP. You'd just switch to GIMP the application instead of separately bringing each of GIMPs eighty seven windows to the front first.

Second, when a document based application loses focus, OS X will hide all floating toolbars and panels and all you will see are your document windows. In Exposé, too, all floating panels and toolbars are hidden. This would mean GIMP's myriad tool windows would become invisible when you switched from the GIMP to another application, or when you viewed GIMP's windows in Exposé. No more needles visual clutter!

Third, OS X has a top menubar. This means each of GIMP's windows wouldn't need to have a separate menubar. The global menubar would enable and disable menu entries as you focused on different windows.

The biggest complaint is that things that should be easy and obvious are buried in counter-intuitive places. The second biggest complaint is that it looks really weird on Windows. The whole mutli-window vs singel-window is a minor argument in comparison.

On that note: I thought that Inkscape was really cool until I tried Blender. The UI experience for Blender is hundreds of times easier because many of the things that you have to do regularly (like scrolling back and forth) are shortcuts.

Not to derail the conversation too much, but Inkscape also needs some improvement where UI is concerned, many things that should be easy are not.

I assume you mean the Blender 2.5 beta? The UI experience for Blender 2.4 and earlier was the least easy interface I've ever seen.

Granted it's fantastic once you know how to use it, but good luck with that.

Thanks for resolving that particular cognitive dissonance; I tried Blender once, then gave up in bewilderment after a few hours. I may have to give it another shot.

Sorry for not being clear. Blender is by no means an example of a superb UI. The learning curve is exceedingly high and even after hundreds of hours behind the controls there are many things I do not understand. Much of this is because the UI controls do not make sense. Of course, with the release of 2.5 there were some improvements, but it is still not that great.

That being said, one thing they did EXTREMELY well was put shortcut keys on all of the things that you do frequently. After doing Inkscape for a while I get really frustrated by the lack of easy navigation.

brilliant answer. Moreover, there is no GIT for designers made from the ground up (I'm envisioning a gui for past drafts).

Also, there are no standards for schools of design. There is no professional course that teaches the basics of ergonomics for the web the same way architectural web development can be taught. Most of the people like myself just follow a few major blogs.

I know many designers who would love to donate to open source projects.

Not sure if I agree about the school.

There are schools that offer courses in interaction design. In addition many visual communication courses offer interaction design in addition to the usual print oriented design.

SparkleShare aims to fill the 'git for designers' void by making using git more like using Dropbox. No URL to hand, sorry.

On the flip side: I'm a developer, and I have no idea how to even find designers, let alone try and get them to help out. If there is a list, I'd really like to find it.

#2 - Perhaps a reasonable starting point would be improving the look of the project's documentation.

I remember the Haskell community actually sat down and had a community discussion about laying down design guidelines for the entire Haskell ecosystem (all packages should use so and so a color scheme, this is our logo, this is our font, etc.). I find Haskell sites almost always aesthetically pleasing, and it was probably due to conscious decision by the community to establish design standards.

I think OSS in general could benefit from giving a designer such broad-brush authority over an entire ecosystem.

I'd love to know if there was a list too.

minor typo: discreet -> discrete

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