2006 / August 20/ Why designers don’t contribute to open source
There’s been much discussion all over the web about how ugly open source is. Why is that so? Because designers are usually the last people to contribute to open source, and it’s a shame. However, it makes a lot of sense if you’ve ever been involved in the political web that is an open source project.
Open-source projects all have a ring-leader
Although, to some, the idea of open source is a magical land of people all around the world contributing bits and pieces to a central repository, and then the democratic vote determines what goes in and what doesn’t — that’s not really the reality. The reality is that every project has a ring-leader, be it Matt or David. This is usually the person who “started” the project and is set to mold the project to their liking.
No matter the person, no matter the projects, people will disagree with this person at some point. Most of the time this ends up in one person running off and starting their own branch of the project (can we count the number of Linux distributions, please?). The end result is that the ring leader is the person who has the final say-so whether you like it or not. It doesn’t matter if 95% of the user-base is against it, this person will do what they want with the project, and that’s final.
Designers are fathers (or mothers)
If you’ve ever been involved in any design process, you’ll soon learn that all designers take their work entirely too personal. It’s a side-effect of the profession, and I’m not quite sure how to put it, except to say that all designers treat their designs like children. If you happen to criticize them, or say that you don’t like them, many designers will take it personally (whether they say so or not).
I admit, that I’m definitely that way. That’s why you haven’t seen anyone else’s contributions to Hemingway yet. People do send me snippets of code… however, without fail, they also change the design in some way. They’ve “improved” it in their own minds eye. Little bells go off in my head and I end up ignoring the patch. It’s just how designers are, and when there’s no client (i.e. paycheck) to check your creative drive, your designs become children that are the most perfect kids on the planet.
Design is an extremely intimate and personal feeling. It’s not something that can be benchmarked or calculated in lines of code. It’s a general feeling that varies from person to person.
The conflict
When designers enter an open-source project, it’s rarely a community effort — it’s usually a small group of individuals (or just one person) who get together behind closed doors to create something new. They don’t show the community until the final product is done. This was the case with Shuttle. A few designers got together (behind closed doors) and created something, not showing the rest of the community until the final product. This is simply the nature of design, and in some ways is unavoidable. Designs have exactly two states: done and not done. Many times it’s the last few pixels that really bring a design together, and anything before that is definitely not done.
Enter the ring-leader.
It’s about this time that the team shows their work to the ring leader. At this point, he forms his own opinion about where the project should head. He offers advice to this group of people, many times telling them that he’d rather only pick and choose parts of the design.
Heads start clashing. The ring-leader fells he/she should be treated like a client, while the designers feel like he/she should take what they’ve given them (as it’s nothing short of perfect in their eyes). This is a vicious cycle that leaves so many open-source projects out in the cold as far as design goes. A few bad experiences like this, and designers don’t contribute to projects anymore.
The fix?
Quite honestly, I don’t think there is a fix to problems like this. I’ve watched it happen on no less than 3 projects, and it’s almost like a scripted play. When money is suddenly left out of the equation, designers are no longer bound by clients or branding guidelines and feel like they have ultimate control over the creative direction. Ring-leaders will always feel they should be treated like clients, and design contributors will always feel like they should be creative directors.
Long live ugly open source!
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Warpspire is the place that web professional Kyle Neath writes about the web. More →
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All my little projects that I leave scattered around the web. Some for profit, all for fun.
August 20 | #
vicious cycle, not ‘viscous cycle’ …get a copywriter :)
August 20 | #
First off, thanks Anonymous for having the balls to sign your name and leave a worthy comment.
Secondly, I agree, there isn’t much anyone can do. I have tried to take part on Shuttle and get it going to see some results, but I am no developer. I design, and that’s it at this point. The only way I think open source will truly welcome designers without conflict is if the designers and developers are one in the same.
August 20 | #
Haha, great observations. Khaled recently expressed his displeasure over Matt’s treatment of Shuttle and his post opened my eyes in some ways to how difficult designers and coders find it to work with each other. A beautiful open source project is only possible if the ring-leader is a designer himself or is someone with great design sensitivity, otherwise it’s almost impossible to convince a hardcore coder of form over function.
August 21st | #
Anonymous: Thank you for pointing out that critical mistake.
August 21st | #
In many respects you hit the nail on the head there Kyle, however the thing is though it’s not always the case, however I definitely seeing this as being the case on the much larger projects.
On smaller projects with smaller users and when the ring leaders don’t have this as a complete business, then the designer is listened to more. At least that’s my personal experience and the experience of many other designers who have contributed to open source projects.
August 22nd | #
Solution: skinable apps
August 22nd | #
Mike, I don’t think skinnable apps are the solution. Far too much effort is put into making everything skinnable, rather than concentrating on the structure of the application.
Skins are superficial — the colours, the size of the text, the borders around boxes. The structure of an interface is more important — what information is presented when, and in what context.
Yes, with CSS it is possible to make deeper changes with a skin, but only if the HTML is coded with a strict semantic-only structure. And only if programmer has put the elements on the page to begin with.
Playing with skins is for tinkerers — people who like fiddling with things but not actually using them. Or for shallow consumers who think “What colours does it come in?” is important.
August 23rd | #
Kyle, I think you are absolutely correct about designers not contributing more to open source apps. Your example about Hemingway contributions is well noted.
An example is that during the Flash hay-day one reason that Joshua Davis’s praystation.com stuck out was that it was sort of open source for Flash. He gave us scripts that you can use and they were so generic that they can easily be intergrated into something for a client. I think it helped his popularity tremendously among his peers and fans. Not only was helping programmers develop in this new technology – he was a designer first and foremost and that was rare.
I think from an illustrator’s perspective we’re always looking to learn new techniques and tricks from other artists. Not much different than programming or web developing. Its just how much your peers are willing to share. Earned knowledge is sometimes more valuable than given knowledge and I feel there is always going to be a reluctance from designers to spill their hard work into something that especially gets used by strangers.
Its rare but from time-to-time a good designer does contribute something that we all end up using but rarely is it free. I’m thinking of Mint and Slideshow Pro as fine examples of application that are for a small fee not necessarily open source but I think the principle is the same. To borrow a line from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sometimes “if something is worth doing, its worth doing for money.”
August 23rd | #
So the problem is there’s no employer, therefore no distinct drive and direction. The not get an employer by asking for donations as was the case with caboose?
August 23rd | #
[...] This is the site of a guy who’s just written an article on why web designers don’t contribute to open source. [...]
August 25th | #
In my experience, just the opposite is true. It’s the projects without a strong ringleader that don’t produce good design work, because nothing ever gets decided. Some poor hapless designer contributes some preliminary designs and everbody else spends the next few months debating endlessly about what color the bikeshed should be.
The “ringleader” of an open-source project shouldn’t be any more of a barrier to your design genius than a client or a boss who cares about his project.
August 25th | #
I think Wilson’s got it right — and he would know too. Django is open-source, it’s developer-oriented, but it (and the supporting web site, etc) are very well designed (by Wilson, no less).
I also think the “craftsman” approach could produce good results here. If one very talented person both designed and developed at least the first version (and acted as a “ringleader” from there on out), they’d be uniquely suited to oversee both the technical and design direction of the project. (e.g. the open-source equivalent of something like Mint, which Shaun designed and developed solo.)
August 25th | #
Wilson: I think you may have just misinterpreted what I wrote, because that’s pretty much exactly what I’m saying. The ring-leader can be a help to the deisgn process… however, they almost always want to be treated like a client in some fashion (as you mentioned). They will think that they know something about design, and (most of the time) they don’t know anything.
Really, when it comes down to it, this ring-leader needs to set his ego aside for a minute and elect a creative director for the project. But, that’s rarely the case with people who start open-source projects. Most of them just want to keep it all to themselves.
August 26th | #
I think, your article misses the point. Designing software systems is a complex task and in my opinion works out best, when interdisciplinary teams are given the freedom to collaborate on an equal level. Unfortunately in the open-source context such examples are rare and mostly happen under specific circumstances, that often involve some commercial tasks. World Company and http://www.djangoproject.com come to my mind or 37signals and RoR of course. Both see the design aspect of their projects as a critical success factor and in this respect I would add Matt Mullenweg as a “design thinker” as well.
Unfortunately most open-source projects don´t work that way. But before I start to question whether the “scratching-my-own-itch” and “not-invented-here” mentality of programmers is less autistic than designing behind closed doors I would rather like to quote Rashmi Sinha to give an explanation, why designers usually don´t contribute to open-source projects:
It´s the problem of currency:
” In any system people exchange goods and services using some type of currency. The currency could be any arbitrary thing - it could be fish, cows, or massages. In the open source world, it happens to be code. The problem is that usability professionals generally do not write code.
I know several UX professionals who volunteered for open source projects. They had great suggestions, but unless they found someone who could code them up, their suggestions had little or no value.”
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_04/open-source.html
August 26th | #
The ring-leader can be a help to the deisgn process… however, they almost always want to be treated like a client in some fashion (as you mentioned). They will think that they know something about design, and (most of the time) they don’t know anything.
Of course they want to be treated like a client. They are the client.
There are good clients and bad clients, and it’s up to a successful designer to be able to deal with both, or know when to avoid problem clients altogether.
August 26th | #
The real trouble is that people don’t agree on what ‘design’ actually is. Too many think that ‘design’ is about how a project looks - it isn’t. Or rather, it isn’t just about that.
In my opinion you have to start with design, and then build around it. A lot of design is about deciding how things are going to work from a client/user perspective. Sure, coders know their stuff, and they can make a project do everything it needs to do - but it will invariably do it in a way that the programmer thinks is logical - which can have no resemblance at all on how end users would like the project to work or be laid out. It’s a designers job to know what that is, and to design the project accordingly - and then to make it look pretty. Open Source works the wrong way around - someone has an idea, they start building, people get recruited and after a load of work has been done they call on a designer. That designer is invariably going to look at the project and compile a rather long list of things it ought to do but doesnt, thinks it does that it doesn’t need to, and want to re-arrange how it does the things that it does. It’s a frustrating experience even before it gets to the making things pretty. By the time that’s been through the ‘approval’ mill, your average designer is going to be so dispirrited as to just give up and abandon the project.
The solution is to have an idea and then get a designer on board before any work actually gets done.
August 27th | #
I agree that egos need to be left out of it, but why is must only the programmers and project leaders do it? Why is it ok for the designer to bring his ego to the table?
August 28th | #
[...] Warpspire » Journal » Why designers don’t contribute to open source [...]
August 28th | #
As an illustration of my point about Open Source being designed by programmers, and the problems that brings, you need only look at The GIMP and how the target audience views that program - with utter disdane. It’s a horrible program to use, despite the fact it’s very powerful and has a lot of the required functions a designer or artist might want.
September 29th | #
Excellent article and completely true. I have had the pleasure(?) of working on both sides of the table. I handle quite a bit of business and IT, but find it more profitable personally to concentrate on selling websites and code than it is for me to do it myself. I have complete faith in my people through outsourcing and some inhouse employees.
Basically, I set up the project, give parameters, methods, and so on (from being a coder) and then give complete control over to the designers. As long as I get updated regularly, I am happy. Then once the project is done, it almost always goes untouched to the client. Minus a few bug issues, but nonetheless…
October 6th | #
“Too many cooks spoil the soup”
A project should have a definite goal/s and objective/s. And since all projects consume resources(time,money etc) you can’t afford to go around the bush. Therefore you need a “Project Manager” or “Ring Leader” to “GUIDE” a project. I don’t mean a projects’ outcome should’nt change over time, but every body should try to get it over with.
December 17th | #
[...] There’s a post over at Warpspire about why designers don’t contribute to Open Source. The conclusion was that designers treat their designs like children, the project leader thinks like a client, and that the two views are incompatible when there’s no money involved to draw natural boundaries. I don’t think that’s actually the problem, I think it’s a symptom of the problem. [...]
February 5th | #
Hi, I think you mean photomatt.net ( you link to the .com )
December 13th | #
interesting
January 3rd | #
Nice…
May 20 | #
DESIGN IN TODAY’s WORLD HAS BEEN EXPLOITED, IT IS REALLY SAD!
ITS EITHER BY ENGINEERS or CLIENTS and the $$$. I OFTEN SEE DESIGNERS BEING TREATED BADLY in REALITY>,>> so terrible somehow i felt that person’s dignity has be stolen or just being squeeze to its limit by the other that who doesnt quite like design or wanting to be the designer himself/herself.
DESIGNERS should form/establish some sort of group internationally/worldwide orginazation throught out the world to handle this problem. IF NOT>> will somehow lead to other problems because of being mistreated and demorallized. DESIGNERs are fragile. and yet sometime stuborn.
BUT that are not the reasons for the others to DEMORALLIZED or Mistreat them BECAUSE OF WHO THEY ARE.
THIS ORGANIZATION should protect DESIGNERS of their RIGHTS.. YOU GUYS JUST LOST IT!. ITS HARD TO GET BACK when in todays world we living in, DESIGNERS has been spit out to hell by most of ENGINEERS, CONDUCTORS , SALES and etc out there.. ITS TERRIBLE>
REMEMBER that it is noT A PROBLEM> but just misconception of what DESINGERS DO’s and DON”T. WHAT THEY REALLY DO and DON”T has been exploited to the extend. that only GOD CAN HELP, BUT if this orginaztion doesnt held any sooner… PROBLEM/TROULBE could get worst.
GOD BLESS
From some dude from the (thridd world)