Open design, take two
I’d like to share this story about open source design, an absolute favorite topic of mine. It’s been an important one to me for ages. But it died out, only to be reenergized recently.
Many years ago, back in 2006, I helped lead the design team of TYPO3 which produced the logo, font and styleguide that has now been in use for over a decade.
We even created a full-featured free TYPO3 font called Share—drawn by Ralph du Carrois:
Back then, I had a very hard time onboarding new designers to the community and its open source project. The coders seemed to just keep coming — whereas one or two new designers were found, in a good year. And they often left again all too quickly.
I began wondering what it would take to make open source software interesting to designers — and we tried all sorts of things. We released the visual identity elements of TYPO3 under a Creative Commons license, we reached out to everyone, met with designers to explain how awesome it was to share — and pretty much every attempt failed, miserably.
Open source was nice for developers — but the designers we found, typically wanted to be the sole créateur of what they designed and not part of a collaborative team producing things together — or they couldn’t see why they should do something without getting paid for the deliverables. They simply did not appreciate the concept of open source. And we failed to communicate it.
I reached out to several other open source projects to hear how it was working out for them. They pretty much all said the same thing as I eventually noted:
“Just give up”.
— Open source just didn’t translate well to design. Instead, just collect some dough and get agencies or freelancers to help out.
One thing worked, though: Opening up the design process.
Here’s an example of how we opened up the design process on the Neos project, three years ago, for building a system of composable dashboard elements:
We did that many times on the Neos team and it worked well — and brought us valuable feedback.
But in terms of real open design — as in collaborating on the design, it was a long drought. From 2008 to 2015, I occasionally looked into what was going on. But I had given up. Some interesting open source architecture projects emerged here and there — but they all seemed to have similar problems with gaining momentum. The vanity of design culture seemed to play a big part.
Yet, here’s the thing. It is actually growing now.
Take a lot at Abstract for example, version-control of your Sketch files:
goabstract.com
Or look to Mozilla’s open design efforts:
Red Hat
Brad Frost also wrote a nice piece about designing in the open:
“It’s uncomfortable to share works in progress– We as humans fear failure. We hate making mistakes. We don’t like sharing things that aren’t the best representations of who we are.”
And most notably, things like the Open Source Design Summit just happened:
I met with Open Source Design in Berlin after the summit and I consider myself reborn when it comes to open design. I’ll be a proud member of that community and try to help as much as I can.
We surely are a crowd in love with technology — turned designers — but I think open source design now honestly has a promising future. One where we can build on top of each other’s design patterns and where we can easily enable our communities to help build our products.
Look at this recent, stellar example from the Netlify CMS community:
There’s also a brand new effort to do an Abstract project for the Netlify CMS.
Open design at Magnolia
Today at Magnolia where I head product management and UX, we’re seeing this related pattern:
Agencies and customers working with our software are asking for (and getting) the Sketch files of our composable UI — to let them re-assemble author interfaces to match their projects. We’re also looking at other ways to open up our design to allow for contributions.
A big thanks to the folks from Open Source Design for showing the way, in a place I thought would continue to be dark and impenetrable.
What are other good examples? I know they’re out there.
