Hello friend,
I have observed that, although open source is all about collaborative efforts, designers find it difficult to find projects to contribute and collaborate within the open-source ecosystem. Contrary to this belief, many open-source projects seem to be lacking good UI/UX designs and designers on their team and this makes them look extremely boring.
This made me realise that is a great need for designers in the Open source ecosystem.
Currently, in the open-source ecosystem, there are too much developer centred issues and there is very little support for things related to product design or icon design
Some designers are really interested in contributing to open source projects but they don’t know about where to find open-source projects who have design-related issues and on what feature or issue they can work on. This becomes discouraging for designers to want to contribute.
There are quite a number of Open-source projects with that have design-related issues, and I have made a short list of some open-source design resources that your skills will be excellent in.
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Thes are the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, VaultPress, Akismet, Gravatar, Crowdsignal, Cloudup, Tumblr, and more. We believe in making the web a better place.
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Bind is an open source, experimental tool for designing interfaces. It's a native OSX app that allows you to design using GSS, an auto-layout like language for describing an interface via constraints.
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Flat UI Free is made on the basis of Bootstrap 3 in a stunning flat-style. Flat UI Free contains many basic and complex components which are great for designers to have at hand: buttons, inputs, button groups, selects, checkboxes and radio-buttons, tags, menus, progress bars and sliders etc.
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Drupal is content management software. It's used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need.
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XWiki is a light and powerful development platform that allows you to customize the wiki to your specific needs. Using structured data and in-page-scripting you can create macros and applications that allow you to extend the capabilities of your wiki.
- Dispora
FezVrasta/bootstrap-material-design
Material Design for Bootstrap is the best way to use Material Design guidelines by Google in your Bootstrap 4 based application
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Fedora creates an innovative, free, and Open Source platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users.
goabstract/Awesome-Design-Tools
If you are looking design tools to use, well this repo is the one for you.
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Open Source Community Africa (O.S.C.A) is for Open source lovers, enthusiasts, advocates and experts within and across Africa with the sole aim of increasing the rate of credible contributions by African software developers, designers, writers and everyone involved in the sphere of technology to open source projects both locally and globally, changing the perception of Africans from just the billion users to the NEXT BILLION CREATORS.
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Mozilla Open Design Repo. Here you can file issues with your design requests for the community design group, find collaborators, or find design tasks to tackle.
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OpenSource Design is a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of Open Source software.
- Thm/uinames A simple tool to generate names for use in designs and mockups.
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This is a beautiful colour gradient tool for design and code, which is an effort to give back to the community.
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Ink is an interface kit for quick development of web interfaces, simple to use and expand on. It uses a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to offer modern solutions for building layouts, display common interface elements and implement interactive features that are content-centric and user friendly for both your audience and your designers & developers.
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PatternFly is an Open Source design system created to enable consistency and usability across a wide range of applications and use cases. PatternFly provides clear standards, guidance, and tools that help designers and developers work together more efficiently and build better user experiences.
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We're the GitLab User Experience (UX) Department. We're comprised of four areas to support designing and building the GitLab product. UX Research, Technical Writing, Product Design, UX Foundations. - Pajamas
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Nextcloud runs on that server, protecting your data and giving you access from your desktop or mobile devices. Through Nextcloud you also access, sync and share your existing data on that FTP drive at school, a Dropbox or a NAS you have at home.
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Mailpile is a modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features.
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This project provides a set of components for the Workday Canvas Design System that can be used to implement user experiences consistent with Workday's design principles.
Image source: uxdesign.cc/dear-designers-please-help-a543..
Conclusion
If you are a designer then, this article should be helpful or know someone who is hoping to get started with open source, then do well to share this article with them.