If you work as a designer in an open source project: Does the project recommend any particular reading or guidelines for design contributors? ("Ten Heuristics", OS guidelines, list of principes,...)
And if yes, how is the material recommended and how is it referred to in the work your community does?
"What should OSD to focus on and have an impact in?"
https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/t/what-should-open-source-design-focus-on-in-the-future/4407
In our recent community call, the question of what the Open Source Design Community wants to achieve was asked. We did not have time to collect input on the call and it is nicer to do it more openly here: If you could pick up to 3 areas for OSD to focus on and have an impact in – what would these be?
I'm speaking on the 26th of April (tomorrow!!) at https://www.oggcamp.org/ in Manchester speaking about my much loved Open Source Design Diary studies project! which you can read here:
https://github.com/sprblm/Diary-Studies-Designers-in-OSS/
This study is now a few years old and i'd be great to get another one of these done. Please reach out if you'd like to see more data and insights from design, usability, user research etc. being done in OSS!
Setting rules does not need research infrastructure or programmers i.e. it is relatively cheap. But it is not easy to do that in open source projects, since:
1. Explicit rules are seen as constraining the clever solutions for particular contexts that many hackers strive for.
and
2. "bazaar style" is baked into tools and culture but does not lend itself for any consistency not checkable by a linter and code guidelines.
A photo from Open Source Design devroom for 2026's FOSDEM!
Had fantastic time running the devroom for another year with some fantastic speakers, audience and folks willing to chip in and help make the room great.
We also finally took an updated photo of the devroom (this was towards the end of the day and not at all the busiest the room got which was at capacity for most of the talks!)
Watch the videos on each talk page here:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/design/
“I’m really nerdy about digital sovereignty as a topic right now. This was raised at penpot festival in 2025 and it’s a huge topic...largely about what companies own and do what with our data.”
Check out the penpot ambassador community hours video recording here: https://bit.ly/penpot-ambassador-03-26
Maybe the first paper on open source software and usability:
"Usability and open-source software development", D.M. Nichols, K.Thomson and S.A.Yeates, 2001: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2331812.2331822
Discourse thread: "What are patterns of rejection of design input/contributions in open source projects?":
https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/t/4395
I was writing a bit about how designers might want to start being involved in open source projects. A part of getting involved is – potentially – also getting not-so-constructive feedback or outright rejections. I would like to hear from others how their less-than-ideal interactions went and if there are any patterns. Ideally, we could find some constructive responses, but even just collecting some experiences can be helpful!
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"Difficulties of design in open source" (discourse thread)
https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/t/difficulties-of-design-in-open-source/787
I’ve been taking notes for a list or presentation highlighting major and minor difficulties that designers as well as design as a whole faces when it comes to open source processes. Yesterday @devonzuegel posted on Twitter: Why are designers relatively rare contributors to open source? Which includes a lot of great replies to be added to the list. It also prompted me to open up the notes and make it a collaborative list! 🙂 So this post is a wiki, you can edit it! Click on the ‘...
Open Source Design
Erioldoesdesign
Jan D
Sven Puschmann