Open Source Design

How to Join

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Participating in the open source design community can mean engaging in discussions about design in open source, joining our community calls or organizing events.

Often, people who join the community are designers working on open source software, developers interested in design or people from other professional backgrounds.

There are no formal requirements to take part in the community other than following the code of conduct.

Communicating well

In order to keep the Open Source Design community a warm, welcoming, and safe place we ask that all participants read and adhere to the Code of Conduct.

Participation channels

Our account on Mastodon is @opensourcedesign@mastodon.social. The account is run by core members. If you want to join discussions or want to be found, use the #opensourcedesign hashtag.

Community call

Our community call happens once per month on the first Wednesday of the month at 7pm CET (please check for when daylight savings happens in your timezone) and we meet via Jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/opensourcedesign (an open source video, chat and audio service). Jitsi sometimes asks for you to ‘login’ but this should not be required to attend a community call.

Usually, we do a short introduction round, give updates on what is going on in the Open Source Design community and anything in the world of open source design and then chat about a few topics more in depth. New people are always welcome!

Discourse forum

Discourse is used for discussions around open source design. The account creation is not restricted - feel free to join.

GitHub

GitHub is used for working on the website and the job board. The content is written in markdown, the website’s theme is implemented in HTML and Hugo templates. You can file issues and make pull requests. Before submitting a pull request, it is best to open an issue first to describe the suggestion and to get feedback (except it is a fix for obvious bugs or spelling mistakes). Please do not submit AI-generated code changes, issues, documentation or code reviews.

Ways to contribute

Contribute design work

Open source projects post design requests on our job board. Some are paid, many are volunteer. If you have a project that needs a designer, you can post a job there too.

Come to events

We run and attend events throughout the year - meetups, conference devrooms, and design sprints. Browse upcoming events or help organise one.

Support us financially

We accept contributions through Open Collective - one-off or recurring, whatever works for you.

What membership looks like

There’s no membership card or formal sign-up. You’re part of the community when you participate - whether that means posting in the forum, helping someone on GitHub, attending events, or contributing financially. If you’re consistently active over time and start taking on responsibility for some aspect of OSD, you may naturally become a core contributor. There’s no formal process for that either - it just happens through sustained engagement.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Links

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This is a showcase of the many websites and platforms where you can find openly licensed icons, fonts, images, tools, and other resources. You can use them for any purpose, also commercial (some works have specific licenses, so always make sure it’s fine to use).

133 resources

Projects 20

Open source projects with active design teams, blogs, and processes: good places to see open design in practice or to start contributing.

Mozilla Makers of the Firefox browser. · UX blog
GNOME Desktop environment. · Design blog · Design team · Human Interface Guidelines
GitLab Git hosting and code collaboration. · UX team
Nextcloud Data sync and sharing. · Design page
Fedora Linux distribution. · Design blog · Design team wiki
Canonical (Ubuntu) · Design blog
WordPress · Design discussion · Handbook
Drupal · Usability group · UI standards
Diaspora Decentralized social network. · UI issues on GitHub
MediaGoblin Media platform.
BeWelcome Hospitality platform.
Mailpile Mail interface. · Issues on GitHub
Ghost Simple blogging platform.
Terms of Service; Didn't Read Contract rating.
LibreOffice · Design team wiki
Trustroots Hospitality platform.
Automattic The company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack. · Design blog
XWiki Development platform. · Design wiki
elementary OS Linux distribution. · Human Interface Guidelines · Design blog
Plasma Desktop environment by KDE. · KDE · Design page · Human Interface Guidelines

Icons 16

Bitcoin Icons Open source icons made for Bitcoin applications, free to use. MIT licensed.
Circum Icons Consistent open source icons as SVG for React, Vue, and Svelte.
Font Awesome The iconic font and CSS toolkit with a large free tier. · GitHub
Font Fabulous A fabulous icon set packaged as a font, free to use. · GitHub
IcoMoon CC icons and free-to-use icon-font creation software.
IconMonstr A large collection of glyph icons, free to use and modify without attribution.
Iconoir SVG icons, MIT licensed.
Inkscape Open Symbols Open source icon sets to use as Inkscape symbols.
Mono Icons A simple, consistent open source icon set for a wide variety of digital products. MIT licensed.
Pictogramas Open source free icons.
Remix Icons Huge repository of consistent, neutrally styled icons. · GitHub
React Icons SVG React icons from popular icon packs. · GitHub
Feather Icons Simply beautiful open source icons. MIT licensed. · React version
Styled Icons Icon packs like Font Awesome, Material Design, and Octicons as React styled-components. · GitHub
The Noun Project CC and purchasable icons for personal and commercial purposes.
Tabler Icons Open source SVG icons in a visually consistent style. MIT licensed. · GitHub

Fonts 11

Some of these platforms also take submissions, so if you designed a font with an open license, submit it there!

The League of Moveable Type
Font Library
Google Web Fonts
Libre Fonts by Womxn
Open Foundry
Open Source Publishing Foundry
Velvetyne
Use & Modify
FontForge Font editor.
Metaflop Parametric font editor.
Type:Bits Collaborative type design workshop.

Images 11

Pixabay
Flickr Creative Commons
Gratisography
The Stocks
StockSnap
NYPL Public Domain Images Public-domain digital collections of the New York Public Library.
unDraw Open source illustrations.
Interfacer
Open Doodles Free sketchy illustrations.
Unsplash
Pexels

Creative Commons media 4

Media from big platforms published under Creative Commons licenses.

Openverse Search over 800 million openly licensed images and audio files (formerly CC Search).
Wikimedia Commons
YouTube Creative Commons licensed videos on YouTube.
SoundCloud Creative Commons licensed sounds and music.

Design tools 18

Design discussion also happens right on a project’s issue tracker, for example at GitHub: get an account, identify design issues, participate, and open new ones. A »Design« label groups them, like in the Nextcloud issues.

Pen & paper Mockups and prototypes without hi-fi Photoshop work.
draw.io Diagrams, mockups.
Pencil Mockups.
Penpot Mockups.
Quant UX Mockups, UX testing, heatmaps.
Krita Art, digital painting.
Blender 3D rendering, animation, textures.
darktable Photo workflow.
RawTherapee Photo workflow.
digiKam Photo management.
GIMP Image manipulation, compositing.
Inkscape Vector elements, print export.
Synfig Animation.
Natron Compositing, VFX, motion graphics.
Scribus Page layout, desktop publishing.
DisplayCAL Color calibration.
Kdenlive Video editing.
Figma UI design, wireframes, prototypes.

Color 6

Blend CSS gradient generator.
Leonardo by Adobe Color contrast generator.
Tanaguru Contrast-Finder For finding complementary colors.
colors.lol Overly descriptive color palettes.
Color Hunt Color palettes for designers and artists.
Nof Complementary Color Palette Generator.

CSS frameworks 8

Bootstrap Fully featured, mature HTML, CSS (LESS), and JavaScript.
Foundation Fully featured, mature HTML, CSS (Sass), and JavaScript.
Basscss Lightning-fast, modular CSS for designers.
Bourbon A simple and lightweight mixin library for Sass.
Kickoff A lightweight front-end framework for scalable, responsive sites.
Space Base A Sass-based responsive CSS framework.
Rebar Simple, lightweight HTML and CSS (LESS).
PatternFly A community of designers and developers building a UI framework for enterprise web applications.

Design reads 11

First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users Jakob Nielsen, 2001.
10 Heuristics for User Interface Design Jakob Nielsen, 1995.
Principles of User Interface Design Joshua Porter.
Ten Principles for Good Design Dieter Rams, 1970s.
A Beginner's Guide to Finding User Needs
Don't Make Me Think Steve Krug's usability classic (book).
The Design of Everyday Things Don Norman's design classic (book).
Humane by Design
Human Flourishing Design Guide
Designing for Trust Data trust by design, principles, patterns, and best practices.
Inclusive Design: Cards for Humanity

Open source design reads 6

Free Software UI Havoc Pennington, 2002.
How Not To Design a Portfolio
Open Design Now Book.
Coordinating usability & testing in Free Software Thesis, 2011.
Barriers Faced by Newcomers to Open Source Projects A systematic review by Steinmacher, Silva, and Gerosa, 2014 (research paper).
An Exploration of Fedora's Online Open Source Development Community Ethnographic study by Diana Harrelson, 2010 (research paper).

Community & inspiration 10

Other nice stuff in the design and open source space.

Libre Graphics magazine Print magazine.
Libre Projects Collection of nice open source web apps.
Libre Arts News for creative professionals using free software (formerly Libre Graphics World).
Libre Graphics Meeting Conference.
Beautiful Open Beautiful sites for open source projects.
Open Design and Hardware Group OKFN open design and hardware group.
PIXLS.US Free and open source photography. · Software list
Photos of Design Research On Wikimedia Commons.
Checklist Design A collection of UX and UI best practices.
Untools Tools for better thinking.

Learn to code 9

Focused on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ideally to implement your own suggestions, but also to better discuss with developers and understand why and how certain things work and don’t work.

Mozilla Developer Network Great web dev documentation.
Transitional Interfaces, Coded For good animations.
Codecademy Interactive tutorials.
Git basics GitHub's guide to getting started with Git.
code.org
Egghead Video courses on web development.
tota11y A bookmarklet to check that your website is accessibility compliant.
Open Source Guide: How to Contribute to Open Source
Course: How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub

Learn to design 3

Hack Design Free design lessons by inspirational designers.
Designlab Design courses with mentorship and projects.
Voice and Tone Mailchimp's guide to writing good copy.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Bibliography

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Unsustaining the Commodity-Machine – Commoning Practices in Postcapitalist Design
Selçuk Balamir · Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

article 2021
How Nextcloud simplified the signup process for decentralization
Jan C. Borchardt · Opensource.com

article 2020
Use your artistic skills to help open source
Jeff Macharyas · Opensource.com

article 2020
Open Design, Libre Graphics: Why terminology matters
Ana Isabel Carvalho, Ricardo Lafuente · Libre Graphics Meeting Saarbrücken

talk 2019
Designing with not for - an observational report on the Wikimedia Movement
Hanna Petruschat · IxDA Berlin

talk 2019
Copy This Book. An Artist's Guide to Copyright
Eric Schrijver

book 2018
Open-source identity design for Simple
Daniel Burka

article 2018
State of Open Source Design in 2018
Victoria Bondarchuk · FOSSASIA

talk 2018
A Beginner's Guide to Finding User Needs
Jan Dittrich

book 2018
The Least You Can Do About Usability in Open Source
Victoria Bondarchuk · FOSSASIA

talk 2017
Connecting design, culture, art, and technology across the archipelago
Kathleen Azali · FOSSASIA

talk 2017
Expectations from Open Source Designers
Ecaterina Moraru · FOSSASIA

talk 2017
Authorship alternatives, free / open source
Loraine Furter, Eric Schrijver

article 2016
Design, meet Open
Dan Makoski

article 2016
Everything is a Remix Remastered
Kirby Ferguson

video 2015
Non-response, Social Exclusion, and False Acceptance: Gatekeeping Tactics and Usability Work in Free-Libre Open Source Software Development
Mikko Rajanen, Netta Iivari, Arto Lanamäki

paper 2015
How to get designers involved in your software project
Nicole C. Baratta · Opensource.com

article 2015
A Designer's Guide for Transitioning to Open-Source Software
Ryan Gorley

article 2015
Why You Should Design for Open Source
Jina Anne · 24 ways

article 2014
Open Source Design
Una Kravets

article 2014
No-one Starts From Scratch: Type Design and the Logic of the Fork
Eric Schrijver

article 2013
Designing In The Open
Brad Frost

article 2013
Open source graphic design
studio ponnuki

article 2011
Usability in Free Software
Jan C. Borchardt

paper 2011
Design in Open Source
Mark Boulton

article 2009
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
James Boyle

book 2008
The problem with open source design
Chris Messina

article 2008
Fundamental Issues with Open Source Software Development – User interface design
Michelle Levesque · First Monday

paper 2004
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lawrence Lessig

book 2004
The Usability of Open Source Software
David M. Nichols, Michael B. Twidale · First Monday

paper 2003
Choosing our Preferences
Havoc Pennington

article 2002

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Why one should be familiar with projects and their structure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How to start as a designer in an open source software project? It seems to be both very simple and very difficult: Simple because the formal barriers to participation are low: You do not need to be hired or show a certificate to contribute or participate in FOSS. Difficult because most projects do not have design projects that one can easily start with so involvement in FOSS as a designer can mean a lot of up-front clarification and effort to understand the needs of a FOSS project.

A common process is often described as one can just ‘pick up’ a task in an open source project, and do a task based on one’s professional competency or interest: Some dialog is confusing? Propose a better wording or layout! The software looks old-fashioned and dated? Create a new style or design system! A function is confusing to use? Create a design based on current simple/usable interface techniques, customized to the needs of the project!

These are all valid design tasks and valid design solutions. They are not wrong, but also, such solutions almost never get implemented for many reasons, each unique to the FOSS project.

The infrastructure with its focus on single issues suggests that one can solve single, self-contained issues and it also matches the culture’s assumption that »everyone can contribute«. A lot of that culture and infrastructure is geared towards code, not interface design or any kinds of design practices.

But even for code, such quick, self-contained contributions are rare. They might apply best to abstract tasks like changing to a more efficient algorithm that still gets the same data and returns the same data. But most code changes interact with other parts of the code and quickly introduce ripple effects. In well-maintained and well-structured codebases these ripple effects are contained, but even to know that they are contained and do not cause a mess usually requires knowledge of the codebase, or the to know the right person to ask. This means, to contribute you need knowledge of the context even when contributing in code, the medium that infrastructure and culture are tailored to. And this applies even more to design contributions that are not received graciously or as easily with the culture and infrastructure of open source projects.

This means that design contributions usually require knowledge about the project one contributes to.

What the technology (programming language or framework) that creates the user interface can do and what not.
What users want to do with the software
What other contributors think the software should do.

The last two points are not always the same; many users want a replacement for a commercial product, many contributors want them to see their software as independent from such assumptions. They say that they are not Photoshop or MS Office, even though a free version of that is exactly what many users would like to have, since what they know will be intuitive for them.

It’s important to observe, and to understand how the project and the communication work. This can often be best explored by making small suggestions or changes rather than general redesigns that assert how design should be done, which easily miss what project might want to do and what can be done with the available technology.

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Typical Tasks in open source design

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Many of the below suggestions are accessible and non-invasive ways of getting involved in FOSS projects. This doesn’t mean you cannot attempt a large, ambitious project that attempts to ’re-design’ or change much of a FOSS project’s interface or experience but as first or early contributions those are often met with concern and caution. The FOSS project has to know that you will be there through the entire time for a large contribution project. It’s best to start small, actionable, visibly valuable and understandable for those not familiar with design terms, processes and practices.

Improve Labels

What is this?

Finding better, more concrete labels for buttons, menus and input fields.

How does it help?

Labels shape expectations—and these expectations should match what the software actually will do.

Example: Don’t use implementation langauge in labels

In this issue on the inkscape project (via @ltlnx) user Adam Belis suggests to replace lables like “Insert node at min X” with “Add node to Left”: Instead of terms referring to variable names (min X) the new lables use everyday concepts (to Left).

When and why does it work?

Adjusting labels is often easy, since they are commonly stored separately from the code and changing the labels usually does not mean that code needs to be changed. There are two risks when changing labels:

Existing users are familiar with the old label and that the change will be confusing to them.
The new label is longer than the available space, which is particularly relevant in languages like German, which typically have longer words than English.

Resources

The Grammar of Interactivity
10 Usability Heuristics, Match Between the System and the Real World.

Improve Icons

What is this?

Finding concrete and familiar icons for buttons, menus and input fields that match the style of the currently used icons.

How does it help?

Icons should be familiar to the user and signify the functionality they stand for. It is important that all icons follow a common style lest they make the interface look messy.

When and why does it work?

Like labels, icons are stored separately from code and can be easily changed. Risks of changing icons are:

Existing users are familiar with the old icon; the change will be confusing to them
Changes are good in theory but introduce unfamiliar elements
There is no easy to recognize standard icon for what is meant and thus a label might be better.

Resources

Myth: Icons enhance usability

Layout of existing dialogs

What is this?

Redesigning layout and widget choice for existing dialogs.

How does it help?

Choosing widgets that are more familiar and more appropriate to the task increases usability. A meaningful layout that matches the user’s idea of the system and the user’s tasks helps to understand what needs to be done.

Example: Use semantically correct widgets

”Interface standards violation, using checkboxes instead of radio buttons” points out that in a dialog in penpot, checkmarks are used for mutually exclusive options, which, following interface standards, is what radio buttons or dropdowns should be used for.

When and why does it work?

Improving the layout of existing dialogs is actionable, since the changes focus on the interface itself and thus do not cause ripple effects through the code but only change one place. This needs basic knowledge of the available widgets and how they can be laid out.

Risks:

Suggestions that can not be realized with the available technology
Not being familiar with the tasks users do might lead to suggestions that look visually more clean but do not match the user’s needs.

Suggesting new features

What is this?

Suggesting features based on user needs.

How does it help?

Suggesting features that are based on actual user needs helps to make applications more useful.

Example: Trash in Penpot

When one deleted a project in Penpot, one would get a warning, but upon confirmation the project would be gone. This is easy to habitually dismiss. A well-established mechanism that does not have the problem is implementing a trash-can, a temporary container from which deleted files can be retrieved again if one accidentally deleted them or changed one’s mind about them.

This feature was suggested by a user in the penpot community forum, jan transferred it to a github issue. One user commented “I’ve never needed this feature until today 😭”, implying that they indeed accidentally deleted projects. The feature request was picked up at some point, so that penpot now has a trashcan for deleted files.

The feature is relatively simple, since it uses an established metaphor and mechanism and was probably also not complex to implement, as it relies on similar components as other ways to organize projects.

When and why does it work?

The first question is: Is the feature actually useful?

A feature from another software that its users like and which you tried yourself and found to be helpful, too (relatively easy).
A feature based on observation and documentation of what you and/or other users do (relatively hard)

The other question is: How hard is this to implement? These are factors that usually lead to difficulties:

If the feature needs custom UI elements, it is usually harder to implement than a feature that can use existing widgets like input fields, menus or toolbars.
If the feature relies on complex, hard to define behavior: “If this happens, it does… but if that happens…”. Anything that “guesses” the wanted behavior is often impossible to get right.
If the feature needs a technology that is not part of the product at the moment. This is not easy to find out without knowing at least a bit about the code, but if developers mention that it would mean to introduce “command-pattern”, “real-time evaluation”, or “caching”, it hints that this is possible, but difficult. It might be worth it, but it needs a dedicated developer.

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Tools and Code

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are basic tools that most projects use. It is helpful to be familiar with them, since this is where most coordination and work is done. There are tools for designers, some of them open source, too, but these tools vary and, if you are a designer you are likely to know them already. This article is about the tools that developers use.

Issue trackers

An issue tracker allows to register problems with the software and discussions about how to solve them. Prototypically, this is a technical problem like the program crashing in a certain condition. However, issue trackers are often used to collect all sorts of problems with the software, including usability problems and feature requests.

It is helpful to first read some existing issues to understand how the issue tracker is used and what tone of communication is typical. Don’t forget that many (but not all) issue trackers allow the use of images, which can be helpful for clarification of problems and to make redesign suggestions.

Code

Just knowing how to program in general is helpful to follow some conversations of developers. However, to contribute code you need to know the specific programming language that is use on the project and often how to use other code (libraries) as well. You also need knowledge of the code of the project. Code of a non-trivial project can span hundreds of pages, and is usually not easy to understand. Usually, people learn how to contribute code by doing some small changes in particular parts of the code and then slowly expanding.

Git

Open source programs are created in one or several programming languages. Different programmers can contribute code. Combining code from several programmers is done via a version management system. The one used most widely is git.

Even if you do not code, you might get in contact with git, since git is often used to manage non-code contributions as well, so icons, translations or text for documentation might also be added through git despite it being a tool made to manage source code – so it more or less struggles with other kinds of content. A simple change or addition is usually not too difficult, though even that will get you in contact with the ideas of commiting changes and then pushing them to a central sever to share them. Git is sadly notoriously difficult to learn, so the use of a graphical git client or a platform like GitHub, GitLab or Gitea is helpful for beginners.

Mailing lists

Particularly older projects use mailing lists instead of web forums for their discussions. It is a way to send a mail to one address and have many people receive it, making to good for group discussions. To read and to post you need to “subscribe” to the list. Before you post, read along for a bit to see if the mailinglist is right for you and to know what tone is common on it.

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UX support/input working with disabled people to help design the next version of the fastest text entry system

Dasher — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:38:59 +0000

Organization: Dasher

Status: closed

Compensation: gratis

Role: UX research, wireframes

A google employee did some UX research with us - and worked on this - https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher-design-guide/tree/main/ux-background its great but we have a lot of questions eg settings panels - and how these work. Bear in mind we are building on iOS, Windows, Linux and even on things like Apple Vision. We have a LOT of settings. Some work has been done to whittle this down. Before we get users testing new builds we want someone to lead our UX work with us to collect data and follow up with clients who are all around the world and help iterate the development. Its fun!

How to Apply:

Will Wade
Current design guide which needs iteration = https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher-design-guide
Governance: https://github.com/dasher-project/governance
Dasher in use - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvsSrClBwPM

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UI/UX Redesign for Therapy Worker Cooperative webpage

Common Ground Therapy Worker Cooperative — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:45:55 +0000

Organization: Common Ground Therapy Worker Cooperative

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: UI/UX Redesign

A not-for-profit social enterprise for local communities in south-east London, UK - owned and run by the therapists who work here.

Our website needs significant changes and some build fixing before we can properly launch and promote it.

This requires skills using PagesCMS, Github Repository, Cloudflare; with the following stack:

Static site generator -> Jekyll 4.4

Templating -> Liquid

Styling -> Vanilla CSS with custom properties

JavaScript -> Vanilla ES6 (accordion, nav, fade-in, forms)

CMS -> Pages CMS

Forms -> Formspree

Analytics -> Plausible (privacy-friendly)

Hosting -> Cloudflare Pages

Build tool -> Wrangler

How to Apply:

commonground@therapy.coop
https://www.therapy.coop/ https://www.loomio.com/commongroundtherapy/

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Gnome HIG compliant icon (SVG) for PDF utility app Quire

Quire — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:25:55 +0000

Organization: Quire

Status: filled

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design

Quire is a libadwaita PDF utility app to merge, organize, split and edit PDF metadata.

Currently it’s icon is very simple and generic, an icon that follows the Gnome HIG guidelines would be really appreciated, but we lack the design talent and capabilities to create it.

If they wish to, the logo designer can be added to the app’s credits.

How to Apply:

Francisco V.
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines/app-icons.html

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UX Designer

eQualitie — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:16:54 +0000

Organization: eQualitie

Status: closed

Compensation: paid

Role: UX Design

eQualitie is looking for an experienced UX Designer to join our team. We’re looking for a person who can help us design usable, accessible and trustworthy experiences in technically complex and often constrained environments. This is an interesting opportunity to shape the usability of tools that are often built technology-first; i.e. this is a chance to take exciting technologies and turn them into meaningful, solutions that people want to use.

What we need help with We are looking for someone to address the critical issue in Internet Freedom technology – designing tools people want to use even when times are normal. Too often, people reach for critical connectivity tools only when it’s too late, when the network is down, shutdown, or the website is blocked. We want to embed resilient tooling into friendly services that people want to use, so that when they need us, they already have us.

Designing for decentralized systems introduces a unique set of challenges, including inconsistent connectivity, non-traditional data flows, privacy-sensitive interactions and diverse user contexts. Our main requirement for the new colleague is the ability to understand these constraints, translate them into clear user experiences, and iterate based on real-world usage.

To do this, we expect you to be able to self-start, driving the process from mapping user journeys, to iterative design and testing and rollout. You will be simplifying complex concepts such as peer-to-peer content sharing, decentralized system set up, ensuring the product remains accessible to non-technical users, and incorporating feedback. You would be the only designer on the team, but we work together, so you’re not alone.

Given the nature of our work, UX research can play a central role. You will work closely with developers, researchers and field teams in various parts of the world to gather insights from users operating in restrictive or low-connectivity environments, and translate those insights into actionable design improvements.

We are looking for a subset of these skills

Strong experience in UX design for web and/or mobile applications Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear and usable interfaces Experience with user research methods, including remote or constrained-context research Proficiency with design and prototyping tools (e.g. Figma or similar) Experience working closely with developers in iterative product environments Nice to have

Experience designing for privacy, security or peer-to-peer systems Familiarity with decentralized technologies or offline-first design patterns Experience contributing to open-source projects Background in interaction design, information architecture or service design Strong interest in digital rights, internet freedom and usability in high-risk contexts Work schedule eQualitie is global, so you will have to coordinate with your team to find a time that works for all of you. Otherwise, you do your work when you work.

How to apply Please send your resume and a cover letter to hireme|at|equalitie|dot|org explaining how your experience and motivation match our needs. Include a portfolio of relevant work demonstrating your UX process and outcomes. If applicable, include links to projects involving complex systems, research-driven design or open-source contributions.

eQualitie welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. We are a remote-first company and offer flexible working arrangements. We are keen to hear from people who consider themselves under-represented in the software, technology or FLOSS communities.

How to Apply:

Alexandra
https://equalitie.org/ux-designer/

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Monoshape logo - favicon ready

Clairty — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:15:33 +0000

Organization: Clairty

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design

Clarity is a project that was neglected by me. I want to create a new website and need a logo that will look good on a favicon and represent the Monoshape icon theme.

Preferably, the created logo would be under a Creative Commons license. CC-0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA (the last is used by the project).

How to Apply:

Jakub T. Jankiewicz
The README of a project contains a illustration of the project: https://github.com/jcubic/Clarity All SVGs are in the repository; you can use them for your work. The Git repo only contains shape, SVG templates (where path is injected when generating an icon), and additional small elements added on top.

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Create visual identity, branding and catchy name

Love takes authenticity — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:39:54 +0000

Organization: Love takes authenticity

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Branding, Visual identity, Logo design

Love takes authenticity is a dating app with web and mobile interface, with focus on core personal values.

We need a complete UI/UX design, and the best place to start, I think, are the foundations of visual identity.

How to Apply:

Juan Torres
https://github.com/JuanTorres93/love-takes-authenticity/issues/8

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The ArcOS project

ArcOS — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:29:15 +0000

Organization: ArcOS

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: UI design and Logo design

Just need someone who could design the theme, UI and logos/icons for the project, they will have freedom over how they design it they will make some guidelines for themselves to make it consistent. I will code it myself and it will need alot of communication and time commitment as the vision is there but haven’t really shaped yet, so there will be a lot of fine tuning.

How to Apply:

Eyad Ragheb, aka kernelstate (me the developer)

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UI/UX Designer for Open Source F1 Widget App

F1 Widget App — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:39:37 +0000

Organization: F1 Widget App

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Mobile app Widgets

I have developed a functional F1 widget app that provides Driver and Constructor standings. I’ve used it personally for a year, and now I want to release it for free on the App Store and Google Play for the 2026 season.

The logic is complete and uses the Ergast-compatible Jolpica API. I am looking for a designer to create a modern, high-fidelity UI in Figma.

You can see the current state of the widgets here: https://imgur.com/a/htrvzLc I added the option to change the background color and transparency of the widgets so please take this into account

How to Apply:

Raztamim94@gmail.com

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Recruiting Digital Illustrator - Freelance position

Permaculture E-Learning (GROW Project GRP 4) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:55:54 +0000

Organization: Permaculture E-Learning (GROW Project GRP 4)

Status: searching

Compensation: paid

Role: Digital Illustration

Location: Remote
Timeline: 3-year commitment (initial focus: Year 1 module build, March–November 2026)
Team: CoLab E-Learning Team

We are building accredited modules of the Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) pathway for CoLab and allied networks.

Our vision over the next three years is to develop peer-reviewed, badged PDC modules that are recognized across permaculture networks and partner institutions. These courses will remain available as open, on-demand learning resources at no cost to the learner.

To bring this to life, we are seeking a digital illustrator (human-created work only, not AI-generated art) to join our E-Learning Team.

Your Role

You will serve as the visual orchestrator of our course modules.

The design team will develop and structure the module content. You will:

Translate curriculum into cohesive visual learning assets and design specifications
Create original diagrams, illustrations, learning visuals, and layout elements
Support clarity, accessibility, and coherence across the e-learning experience
Collaborate closely with the design team to finalize delivery on the platform

You will become a team member contributing to this educational program.

Commitment

Remote collaboration
Participation in team meetings when requested (in alignment with CoLab accountability policy) in the afternoons and evenings in CET, Monday to Friday
Ability to commit to the broader 3-year vision of modular PDC development
Estimated capacity: approximately 25% of the project budget allocation, c. 1500 GBP p/y, paid per hour at your equitable wage rate

The design team is currently scheduled for structured build sessions twice weekly, Thursdays and Fridays, during the initial development phase. Your engagement will align with module handover cycles.

We’re Looking For

Strong digital illustration portfolio (educational or systems thinking experience preferred)
Ability to visually communicate ecological and relational concepts
Comfort working within collaborative, values-aligned teams
Commitment to equitable wage principles
Interest in long-term ecosystem building rather than short-term gig work
Preferably: someone who has attended one or more Permaculture Design Certificates and has previously done permaculture design work

Membership Requirement

Applicants must be CoLab members. If you are not a member, you can find out more about joining here.

Future Opportunities

Beyond this role, the illustrator may also be consulted or engaged on additional CoLab or allied network projects as a service provider.

Application

Please submit:

Portfolio link
Brief statement of interest (why permaculture education?)
Confirmation of availability beginning May 2026
CV or LinkedIn profile link

We aim to fill this role by the end of April to maintain our delivery timeline. If interested, please follow the link to apply.

How to Apply:

Jyostna Maan - contact@minimumviable.academy
https://perma.earth/recruiting-digital-illustrator-permaculture-e-learning-grow-project-grp-4/

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Home page design for our No To Big Tech movement

No To Big Tech — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:18:50 +0000

Organization: No To Big Tech

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Web design

No To Big Tech is a decentralised, people-powered movement that aims to raise awareness and take action against Big Tech.

We would love help with the design of our homepage, and potentially other key pages.

Note that the website is powered by Osuny, which is a values-aligned CMS with a focus on low carbon design. We are limited with design features available but are happy with this platform and those constraints.

We would be happy to feature you on the website in some form, if you are happy to be included as a Contributor, and hopefully to have you involved with the movement going forward!

How to Apply:

Matt Tutt (degoog1e@protonmail.com)
https://www.notobigtech.org/

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Open Source Design: Governance research and documentation project

Open Source Design – Governance and Organization project — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:22:48 +0000

Organization: Open Source Design – Governance and Organization project

Status: closed

Compensation: paid

Role: Governance, documentation, user/stakeholder interviews, research, project support,

Please see this document for the full job description: https://cloud.opensourcedesign.net/s/Ly6WTWYg4Gn5aQT

Open Source Design (OSD) is a community of designers and developers pushing for more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open-source software.

OSD received funding to explore and evolve the governance, decision making and organizational structure of the OSS community project. We expect some open sourced documents/writing to be published, some updates/information to be documented on our Github organisations/repositories and research documents to be produced.

We are looking for support in exploring and understanding governance broadly for Open Source Design. You can find some background details in this repo https://github.com/Erioldoesdesign/open-source-design-community-governance/blob/main/the-state-of-open-source-designs-community-and-governance.md

We’re looking for people with experience of governance processes and decision making across volunteer communities to carry out research and discussions that lead to an understanding of where OSD’s governance and decision making can be added to, changed and improved in order to build and implement a resilient, sustainable, equitable and respectful process that can ensure OSD’s community can clearly understand what and why the community focuses on, with what resources and have clear pathways to connection and contribution.

We’re asking for simple indicators of interest from people wanting to take on this work in the form of either written answers to the following questions or any other formats (audio/video) that the applicants may find more comfortable.

Question 1: Have you any public examples of helping community groups through governance and decision making process that you can share or any brief descriptions you can offer?

Question 2: Briefly (no more than 200-500 written words) describe your thoughts on approaching this work from what you’ve read in this project posting so far? What questions/challenges come up for you about the nature of this work and how do you intend to explore those?

Please don’t send an overwhelming amount of information or evidence. We want to see how you respond to these questions and not benchmark based on impressive sounding prior clients. Please keep clarifying questions to a single email thread if needed. If we have follow up questions or clarifications we’ll reach out for or additional information. Please do not request calls with any of the OSD members about this work.

Applications will be assessed based on the answers to the above questions and evidence of public example/s from question one. The OSD governance committee of 5+ people will assess these via private discussion.

Applications will close on 15th of May 2026

Candidates will receive feedback by June 15th 2026

How to Apply:

**erioldoesdesign@gmail.com** OSD Governance Advisory committee chat group (access given once a individual has been selected) The selected candidate will ‘report’ to the wider community of open source design. There are no management ‘approval’ processes where a specific member will ‘sign off’ on the work. The work will reach a state that the OSD community can continue with and meets as reasonable an amount of ‘approval’ as feasible in the current decision making processes.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/osd_introduction_to_open_source_design/ https://opensourcedesign.net/ (Specifically the goals and manifesto pages) https://opencollective.com/opensourcedesign https://github.com/Erioldoesdesign/open-source-design-community-governance/blob/main/the-state-of-open-source-designs-community-and-governance.md

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Help fund the recordings of talks for FOSS Backstage Design 2026

Eriol Fox & Core Open Source Design team — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Date: March 2026

Location: Berlin, Germany

a photo of the speakers podium from FOSS Backstage Design 2026

FOSS Backstage Design took place for the 3rd year in a row to bring together people working on the user experience of open source software.

FOSS Backstage Design is the place to meet designers, UX-experts, OpenSource enthusiasts, product managers and people generally interested in UX, accessible design and usability.

This year however, was harder to raise sponsorship for the event. As such, the cost of the video recordings for the talks on the day were at risk of not being funded.

The folks at Plain Schwartz, who are organizing many FOSS events stepped in to take on the cost of recordings of talks.

Open Source Design covered a part of the venue and catering costs for the 2nd and 3rd year in a row, but as a community run project on donations we cannot cover the 3000 Euro amount for the excellent level of professional recording, audio and editing that is offered by the team that Plain Schwartz hires.

Please consider donating what you can to help Plain Schwartz recover the costs to record the talks here:

https://opencollective.com/opensourcedesign/projects/foss-backstage-design

You can look forward to seeing the excellent talks about open source software and design related topics, from Blender, Mastodon, AWS and KDE in the coming weeks on their YouTube channel soon as well as an article write up here on Open Source Design’s articles section too!: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainSchwarzUG

dalai and pablo speaking at foss backstage 2026

lauwri speaking at foss backstage 2026

imani speaking at foss backstage 2026

andy speaking at foss backstage 2026

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Homepage Redesign

Figranium — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:15:49 +0000

Organization: Figranium

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Web Design, UI Design, Homepage Design

Redesign of our homepage at figranium.dev, you are free to do whatever you want, but our tagline is “Deterministic Control for an Agentic World” and you cannot alter or change the logos/icons

How to Apply:

asernasr@figranium.dev

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSDEM 2026: Open Source Design Devroom wrap up

Eriol Fox — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1 February 2026

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

A photo from towards the end of the open source design devroom day

Introduction

The 12th edition Open Source Design devroom in 2026 ran for a half a day on Sunday 1st of February from 13.00pm until the end of the conference at 17.00pm with 8 talks. Most talks had a good/full turn out of audience numbers in the room, even right up until the end of the day on Sunday, which is typically when many folks start travel home from Brussels.

Each talk followed the same format as years previously, 20 minutes each with 5 minutes for questions, and again, many talks could have been much longer and delved into the details and nuances of topic like security, privacy, supply chain safety, design systems and collaboration processes. In recent years we’ve applied for full days of a devroom which would either mean longer talks from some speakers or more speakers. This year we received over 30 talk proposals. Which have their speaker and OSS project information anonymised so that the core maintainer team can vote on the quality of the topic and mitigate bias towards familiar people and OSS projects. We only received a half day in 2026 which means shorter talks and less speakers but as the interest for open source design grows we’ll continue to apply for more time and attention to the varied and broad aspects of design in OSS.

All the talks were recorded and will be available on their individual pages on the FOSDEM website. https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/design/ (this website will be archived once FOSDEM 2026’s website is live. When that happens please search for ‘FOSDEM 2026’ in a search engine and look for the archived site)

You can also find every design devroom from 2015 onwards by visiting the yearly specific website of FOSDEM e.g. https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/open_source_design/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/open_source_design/ etc.

In 2026 we did struggle to include talks with accessibility as a critical component as well and also endeavoured to platform and prioritise speakers from traditionally under-represented geographical locations but as FOSDEM is an free to attend conference, each devroom organiser, should they want to pay for speakers and volunteers would need to fundraise. This year we were able to use limited funds of $550 USD to pay for two speakers partial travel/accommodation costs. If you’d like to contribute to 2027’s travel funds for FOSDEM and/or other conference costs for open source design related events and conferences you can do so on our open collective funds page: https://opencollective.com/opensourcedesign

The Talks

Designing attestations UI: The Security and Safety of OSS package supply chain - Eriol Fox

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HCQRVT-designing_attestations_ui_the_security_and_safety_of_oss_package_supply_chain/

The speaker worked on a 12+ week project looking at how to express in the varied UI’s of three package repositories (npm, pypi and RubyGems) we can now see more clearly what developers, across skill and knowledge levels, use in package repository pages to make a decision on the security of an OSS located on a registry. These decisions are critical for better understanding trust, value, social proof and the knowledge of secure practices across developers and helps answer the question: how much do developers know about the security of their software supply chain?

You can take a look at the project repository here: https://github.com/ossf/wg-securing-software-repos/tree/main/docs/attestations-style-guide

The UI Layer of Security: What could go wrong? - Elio Qoshi & Anja Xhakani

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/YTN9QV-ui-layer-of-security/

The speakers took the audience on a journey into the rarely looked at the parts of technology systems from a security perspective that is the clicking the buttons and interpreting the warnings part. A surprising number of real-world security failures happen not because the code is flawed, but because the interface leaves too much room for dangerous misunderstandings. The speakers touch on what the common mistakes are when the people that build and configure technology assume that users are fully aware of risks and nuances involved in operating the technology. This knowledge/understanding gap can lead to critical user security risks.

The speakers draw on their work at Ura with security-critical and open source projects, this talk explores how the user experience itself can introduce or amplify security risks and why these issues often slip through traditional code-focused reviews.

Designing For Trust and Safety In the Age of Predatory Technology - Caroline Sinders

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PRLSR3-designing_for_safety_in_the_age_of_predatory_tech/

This speaker goes deep into what online safety looks like in the age of Grok, misinformation, doxxing, and technology company founders imposing their own views of safety, surveillance, and ethics on their platforms. The speaker is a former trust and safety employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and an online gender based violence expert with over a decade of experience,. They cover new design patterns, best practices, and product tooling to help achieve safety, security and foster trust for all types of communities online, but especially marginalized and vulnerable ones.

Parts of the talk focuses on how open source design can be a part of the solution space for creating safety, and how transparency, security and privacy should be leveraged for safety online. The speaker finishes with actionable design insights, UX, UI, new types of product design, and design related policy that could be implemented all for safety.

Gephi Lite: We Built a Data Visualization Tool, But We Couldn’t Design It - Alexis Jacomy & Desaintjan Arthur

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/UKTJ3V-gephi-lite-redesign/

The speakers talk about Gephi Lite which is a web-based open-source network visualization tool built by a three-person engineering team. After two years of development and a functional application the team had a nagging feeling that the user interface wasn’t working for users. After bringing in Arthur Desaintjan, a design intern the Gephi Lite team were able to address the needs for usable interface fro users. The speakers share how they approached design at a pivotal moment in Gephi Lite’s life - first by stepping back to clarify what Gephi Lite should really be, then by running user interviews that revealed just how far our assumptions were from reality.

Design Systems in Open Source - Andres Betts

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/ANP9VX-design_systems_in_open_source/

The speaker takes us through how Design systems evolved their process and how UI graphics are made, full with automation and deep integration. They then contrast this industry view with their experiences of Open Source communities, who are often left out of these design system processes and practices given that OSS are for certain subset of OSS user groups. The speaker then speaks about how using PenPot, for KDE Plasma and how they saw an opportunity to build something unique to develop the Plasma desktop faster and with higher fidelity to user experience standards. The speaker takes us through the implementation at the KDE Plasma Desktop from graphics, colors, typography, graphical components to much more.

You Don’t Need to Be a Designer to Design: Fixing UX in Open Source - Archita Gorle

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/Y7HLDE-you_dont_need_to_be_a_designer_to_design_fixing_ux_in_open_source/

The speaker starts with speaking to how Open source thrives on contributions from developers, testers, and community builders, but how design often gets left behind, especially when there are fewer designer in the FOSS ecosystem than people who write code.

The good news: you don’t need a design degree do design. You might start with ‘I see the problem, but I’m not a designer’ and look for the methods to help, which the speaker then explains some simple, practical design methods to identify and solve UX issues in open source projects. This talk focuses on the simple steps anyone can try and how to ask the right questions, sketch ideas on paper, and try them out with friends or community members. No special skills or software needed: just curiosity and a willingness to make things easier for others.

Understanding developer needs - User research in Forgejo - Otto Richter

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EXQFAR-forgejo-developer-centric-user-needs-and-design/

This speaker, who themselves started out on the code/software side of an OSS project and themselves began to engage with user research and UX work when they saw opportunities for improvement in the project they were affiliated with. This speaker helped the audience to understand your OSS users and how that understanding should be an important step of software development. In recent years, many end-user facing FLOSS communities integrated at least some aspects of design into their development. Unfortunately, most developer-centric projects still haven’t started to even think about it. This talk concludes two years of user research in Forgejo, a Git-backed software forge and collaboration platform. Forgejo can be self-hosted or used on a public instance like Codeberg.org to create software together, from sharing and reviewing code to tracking user problems, doing project management and doing design work.

Use eye tracking to figure out usability issues, the open source way - Dmitriy Kostiuk

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/FS8F3U-use_eye_tracking_to_figure_out_usability_issues_the_open_source_way/

The speaker dives into the usage of eye trackers to track usability issues in FLOSS. The speaker introduces different eye-tracker tools and process and shows detailed examples showing the different data and information that can be captured by using eye-tracking and what insight that offers to an FLOSS project. Like seeing whether a user looks at written content or quickly uses a search function on a documentation page.

Visualization of short-term and long-term eye tracking data series is explained with sample code for Graphviz and GNU Octave.

What the audience said…

Feedback this year was again, glowing and kind with attendees of talks valuing specifically the focus on critical topics in OSS like security and privacy and not just the highly valued aspects that are expected by designers in regards to the UX and usability, but the growing interest in cryptography and package security. The talks that also welcomed broad participation into design in OSS were highly rated as design can often seem like a practice that can only be done by the trained few, but Archita and Otto’s talks emphasised how design and user research can be invested in many ways but different folks in OSS to the benefit of OSS projects. The designers in the room were energised by the depth in the topics of design systems and eye tracking and after the talks there were many new to OSS designers looking for pathways into contribution to OSS.

if you’d like to send us a review or quote from your experience of the FOSDEM Open Source Design devroom please email us on core(at)opensourcedesign(dot)net - feedback, compliments and critique is how we keep our volunteer energy up year on year and we always hope to improve experiences of people at FOSDEM as best we can.

You can also email us if you’d like to be involved in the Open Source Design Devroom as a volunteer next year. We always need help with the following:

Applying for the FOSDEM devroom and stand in September/October every year Promoting the call for talks to people in the open source design space Helping up develop fundraising processes for travel stipends and raising funds to distribute to speakers and volunteers Communications and liaising with selected speakers ensuring they have their talks prepared and everything they need to attend FOSDEM in Brussels. Volunteering in the Devroom at FOSDEM in Brussels. Hosting the room, Introducing speakers, tech and audio support, ensuring the room is safe and space is monitored and cleanup. Preparing banners, posters and stickers for handing out to attendees.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Full-time UX Designer - Design systems

Canonical design system — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:35:35 +0000

Organization: Canonical design system

Status: searching

Compensation: paid

Role: Design system

Please apply through: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4262272853/

We are hiring a UX designer for our Design System Team.

You will play a key role making open source software available to the world. Our Design function ensures the experience of the software and infrastructure we build is true to our intentions, and delivers the tools our community and customers need. The Design System UX designer makes that possible by defining, evolving and advocating for a consistent use of design system that scales across our products.

This role sits in the design system team reporting to Design Systems Management

Location: This role will be based remotely in the EMEA region.

The role entails

Building and evolving Canonical’s design system, ensuring measurable adoption, consistency, scalability and accessibility across our products
Collaborating with designers, engineers and stakeholders to translate user needs and brand principles into reusable components, patterns and guidelines
Championing design system best practices, advocating for cohesive user experience and design, providing documentation and support for cross-functional teams
Designing and documenting UI components, design tokens and interaction patterns
Ensuring timely and efficient delivery of the roadmap
Enabling alignment on design system usage and governance across teams
Advocating for accessibility, performance, and scalability in design system decisions and iterating based on data and technological advancements
Staying ahead of industry trends, ensuring innovation and balancing it with system coherence and performance

What we are looking for in you

Relevant experience in UX/product design, with a strong focus on design systems in complex environments
A portfolio demonstrating strong expertise in design systems, including component libraries, documentation and handling complex environments
Exceptional educational achievements in design or related behavioral science discipline
Expertise in Figma/Penpot, Storybook and design token workflows
Experience of collaborating with engineers and bridging design and code
Proven ability to apply design process and clearly communicate and document design decisions
Excellent attention to detail and systemic approach to solving complex design challenges
Commitment to transparent project delivery and owning team deadlines
A passion for balancing consistency and innovation
Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events

How to Apply:

hayden.chambers@canonical.com
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4262272853/

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Design logo for zsweep A minimalistic Web Game with Vim motions

zsweep — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:14:18 +0000

Organization: zsweep

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design & branding

Design a logo that will be put on the website page and as favicon for web zsweep.

How to Apply:

tommyguo024@outlook.com
https://github.com/oug-t/zsweep

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

UX/UI Redesign for PlugBrain – Digital Wellbeing Android App

PlugBrain — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 21:46:53 +0000

Organization: PlugBrain

Status: searching

Compensation: paid

Role: Design, UX, UI

PlugBrain is an open-source digital wellbeing app for Android. It reduces distraction by locking selected apps, users must solve math challenges to unlock them. Difficulty increases the more they use their phone, encouraging healthy habits.

We want a full redesign of the app to make it:

More modern and visually appealing
Clearer and easier to navigate
Engaging and playful without being overwhelming

You will help define the new design direction, including improved onboarding, better flow for locking apps, and redesign challenge screens.

Project is paid, compensation based on experience and agreed scope.

How to Apply:

belaid.mohammed.said@gmail.com
https://github.com/msbelaid/PlugBrain/ https://f-droid.org/packages/app.plugbrain.android/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.plugbrain.android

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Design our new home page + web site theme

Owncast — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 19:23:06 +0000

Organization: Owncast

Status: searching

Compensation: paid

Role: Web design

Owncast is the free and open source live video streaming + chat server, allowing anybody to run their self-hosted live streams similar to the large big tech options.

The project has hit five years old, and it’s time to give our home page and documentation a facelift.

We’re looking to redesign our home landing page to improve how we explain the project to people, add a bit more levity to our image, and simply freshen things up.

As a small Open Source project, our budget isn’t huge. But we want to be able to offer something to somebody talented who is excited to work with us.

How to Apply:

Gabe Kangas (Project Maintainer)
https://owncast.online https://docs.owncast.dev/updated-web-site-2025

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2026

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 31 January & 1 February 2026

Time: Sunday 1 February 2026 13.00 - 17.00

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

Please see the bottom of this article for the call for proposals link.

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After the success of open source design at previous FOSDEM’s, we are gearing up for the next edition of FOSDEM, taking place at the Université Libre Brussels on 31 January & 1 February 2026.

Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

Open Source Design has been part of FOSDEM for over a decade now! giving designers who work with or contribute to free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) a platform to share their ideas. You can find the link to our devroom here where talks will be annouced once they have been submitted and accepted. The timings and room will also be updated here too. https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/design/

Travel support

Open Source Design has limited fund to support travel, accomodation and expenses for speakers and can be found on our open collective page. We will be prioritising under-represented members of the FOSS community with these travel funds and can offer invitation letters for visas. Please send an email to core@opensourcedesign.net to be considered for travel stipend support.

Get involved!

We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!

“Design” can mean anything including typography, graphic design, interaction design, user experience, human-computer interaction, accessibility, information architecture, content strategy, service design, user research, design research and more. You don’t have to be an expert in the field – you could have been involved in a project for as little as a year or as long as a decade. As long as you have been involved with design in any respect in an open source project, we’re interested to hear what you think!

Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:

Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!

Some examples of previous talks featured at the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM are:

Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System Laurel Terlesky at FOSDEM 2025

CLI Design for Designers and Developers Hartmut Obendorf at FOSDEM 2025

The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source Projects Khushi Garg at FOSDEM 2025

Reimagining Personal Computing with E ink: Community Insights and Design Challenges by Alexander Soto at FOSDEM 2024

Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt by nojhan at FOSDEM 2024

Bad UX is Bad Security: Adventures in Qubes OS UX Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka at FOSDEM 2024

Penpot 2.0 is here! by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz at FOSDEM 2024

Accessibility & Open Source: How open source is key to building a more inclusive world by Mike Gifford at FOSDEM 2023

Documenting a Design System: Lessons learned from open sourcing the Orbit docs by Aaron Collier at FOSDEM 2022

Open Source Design movement in Africa by Peace Ojemeh at FOSDEM 2020

What is the talk format?

In 2026, all talks at the Open Source Design devroom would be in-person and recorded/streamed. You will have the stage for 25 minutes in total, so you can have a 20-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions from the audience, or a 25-minute talk with no questions. Talks cannot be longer than 25 mins otherwise you get gently moved off ‘stage’. If you have a longer talk that is interactive, we can consider allocating you 45 minutes for two talk slots but this is a rare likihood.

How can I submit a talk?

Talk submissions will be sent directly to FOSDEM’s Pretalx system. Submissions for talks must select ‘Open Source Design’ under ‘Track’. https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp

There the Open Source Design Core Maintainer team will review talks and accept and reject. We should have space for around 6 20 min talks in the afternoon. You can request a certain time slot, earlier in the afternoon or later in the afternoon but please be aware this will be on a first come first serve basis and subsequent changes once given a slot must be discussed with the other speaker you want to swap with. Additionally we need you to be in the room for 15-20 mins before your talk (or attend the talk before hand) as the room can get quite full and it’s hard to set you up as a speaker if you’re stuck outside the room.

We’re investigating how we can fund a sign language interpreter or live captioning for 2026. To help fund this or discuss what you can offer in terms of support please contact core@opensourcedesign.net

What’s the deadline?

Submission of talks must be done by the end of November 2025

Accepted talks would be announced latest in December 2025.

All deadlines are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.

Additional information

Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

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UI/UX & Interaction Designer (Remote/Europe)

Collabora Online — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:56:36 +0000

Organization: Collabora Online

Status: searching

Compensation: paid

Role: UX, UI, interaction design

Collabora Productivity build Collabora Online - an open source, in-browser, interoperable, feature-rich, enterprise document collaboration suite.

We’re looking for a UI/UX Designer to collaborate with our management team as well as our engineers to define and implement innovative solutions for product direction, visuals, and user experience. You will be part of a two person design team within engineering and design new features and improvements to our software, with focus on user-system interaction. You ideally have an interest in open source as well as understanding of software-enterprise business and are good at solving problems creatively, effectively and independently.

Responsibilities:

Conceptualize original ideas that bring simplicity and user-friendliness to complex design requirements, while keeping functionality
Execute all visual design stages from user research, through ideation and hand-off to engineering
Closely communicate, collaborate and work iteratively with relevant engineers
Create wireframes and mockups with specifications to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas
Conduct user research and evaluate user feedback
Establish and promote design guidelines, train engineers in best practices, and standards
Manage delivery timelines, resources, and risk assessments
Help to fill holes in icon surface from metaphor to consistent icon.

Requirements:

Degree in design, interaction design, or a related field is preferred – or equivalent experience.
UI/UX design experience with a strong portfolio and excellent visual design skills
Analytical skills and ability to work in a complex environment
Can-do attitude and solution focus as well as commitment and strong work ethic
Excellent communication skills in English, additional languages beneficial
Substantial European Timezone overlap

Desirable but not required skills:

CSS experience, some JavaScript knowledge
git revision control experience
Linux command-line & desktop experience
Office Productivity software experience
Project management experience with small teams of engineers
Account management experience
Willingness to travel to conferences & give product & design presentations …

What we offer:

A fun and growing team with a passion for open source
A legacy rich product with deep opportunities for improvement that is used by millions
A competitive salary
Flexibility for a healthy work-life balance
Remote first, 100% work from home (modulo annual conferences & business travel)

We are looking for somebody with ambition and drive, who would like to grow and learn. Send in your CV as above, if you are interested in this role, and thank-you for reading this far!

How to Apply:

ben.toynton@collabora.com
https://jobs.lever.co/collabora/9829e319-e3b1-431e-b360-af9c8d10adb5

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Design a Logo and branding for a not-for-profit, therapy Worker Cooperative social enterprise

Common Ground Therapy — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:51:43 +0000

Organization: Common Ground Therapy

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design, Branding of a design or visual language that we can use to create our website

Logo design, Branding of a design or visual language that we can use to create our website

Compensation: gratis / minimal expenses

Hello and thank you for reading,

We are a south east London-based start up trying to get a website up and running as the next step in developing our project.

Our goal is to make therapy space more accessible to local therapists and in turn make therapy and better mental health support more accessible to minoritised local communities in the south-east London area.

I am writing in the hope that you might be interested in supporting our project which needs logo and branding support. We are not particularly proficient with tech and design jargon but we try our best!

We have a range of ideas that we can forward that should help a lot to shape the logo design and the design language that we can use. However there is nothing we are ‘married to’ – we are very open to people’s creativity regarding our design and very grateful for any input offered.

Our project is yet to draw any start-up money or make any income, and the work of developing is only done on a voluntary basis. We are made up of 2 people, one of whom is risking financial hardship. Because of this we are trying where ever possible to keep our costs low via the generosity and support of fellow service cooperatives and social enterprises.

We have tried to raise funds but are now waylaid by a recruitment push due to the loss of one member following bereavements.

Best wishes,

Common Ground Therapy

How to Apply:

Nicholas
www.therapy.coop https://www.baatn.org.uk/job/common-ground-therapy-worker-cooperative-south-east-london-part-time-join-londons-only-therapy-cooperative-common-ground-therapy-is-a-worker-cooperative-social-enterprise-which-is-seeking/

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We'd like a children's book for TUF!

TUF (The Update Framework) — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 13:01:00 +0000

Organization: TUF (The Update Framework)

Status: searching

Compensation: gratis

Role: Book

Want to make a children’s book?

The TUF project (a Linux Foundation project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation) is used to secure a huge swatch of cloud systems, programming languages (Python, Rust), cars, the legal code in Washington DC, Baltimore, etc. Helping us here will help a critical part of the software infrastructure we all rely on.

One comment we’ve heard is that the concepts behind TUF are hard to learn. We really need something to make it easy to understand the system so that we don’t scare off people. We’d be happy to help you to understand TUF so you can make something fun and educational.

There is a history of making children’s books in the CNCF, using the project mascots. (For example, https://www.amazon.com/Phippys-AI-Friend-Workshop-Parents/dp/B0CWYF8JT6 ) Tai the TUF elephant is our mascot: https://www.cncf.io/phippy/ However, using Tai (and the rest of the Phippy and Friends characters) is not a requirement.

How to Apply:

jcappos@nyu.edu
The CNCF Slack ( https://communityinviter.com/apps/cloud-native/cncf ), has a #tuf channel. This is the best place to reach out.

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Design our new project logo

Muchrooms — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:16:41 +0000

Organization: Muchrooms

Status: searching

Compensation: paid

Role: Logo design

Muchrooms is a new(ish) project, it is a Jabber/XMPP group chat implementation in Rust. It focuses on testing, moderation and privacy. I recently got a grant from NLnet to work on it.

The design work would consist in creating a logo (vectorised) for the project to use.

I am not much of a design person and I’m not sure what directions to set, feel free to ask more questions and propose ideas yourself.

Jabber/XMPP is a standard communication protocol. It features at its core federation and extensibility. It would be nice for this to be reflected in the work.

I have in mind either various islands of mushrooms linked together somehow. Or, some variant of the XMPP logo overrun by mycelium.

I don’t want the logo to look too realistic visually (as in, close to a photograph).

Even though I do have a grand for working on the project, I regret not to have factored this in, and this is the little I can spare with nonexistent salary otherwise.

How to Apply:

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Design a logo for django-commons

django-commons — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:46:10 +0000

Organization: django-commons

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design

Django Commons is an organization dedicated to supporting the community’s efforts to maintain packages. It seeks to improve the maintenance experience for all contributors; reducing the barrier to entry for new contributors and reducing overhead for existing maintainers.

It has currently 17 packages and growing. The logo should represents the values of the organization

How to Apply:

Daniel Moran (daniel@moransoftware.ca)
Existing logo: https://github.com/django-commons

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UX/UI Designer Wanted for Open-Source Second-Brain App (VOID)

VOID — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:21:54 +0000

Organization: VOID

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: UX/UI Design

VOID is an open-source, local-first second-brain app built with Rust, Vue, and Tauri - inspired by Notion and Obsidian, but designed to be truly yours.

We’re looking for a UX/UI designer to help shape the user experience and visual identity of the app as we move toward our first public alpha. The work includes designing the core editing interface (WYSIWYG Markdown editor), dashboard layout system, theming, plugin system UX, and improving overall visual clarity and usability.

You’ll be working closely with a passionate solo developer who’s building this as a full-time commitment, with the support of a small team ready to assist when needed.

We aim to create something beautiful, powerful, and fully hackable - and your input can shape how people use knowledge tools in the future.

How to Apply:

Egor (lead dev) ghostoftranshumanist@gmail.com
GitHub: https://github.com/WTWB-none/void Current tasks board: https://github.com/users/WTWB-none/projects/3

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Branding for Open Music Games Organization

Open Music Games Organization — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:05:17 +0000

Organization: Open Music Games Organization

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design & branding

About Us: Open Music Games Organization is a voluntary small growing collective of karaoke geeks who continuously unite developers of open source scene to make high quality sing and band games. We are based in Germany and are founded in 2023. We provide the Open Music Games Hub - a central info portal for all music games that share one open source song format. And we maintain the worldwide popular ultrastar song format standard. We need: A professional logo for the organization to get a more serious and official image.

How to Apply:

Marwin (Founder) contact@open-music-games.org
https://open-music-games.org/news/

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activist.org platform design support

activist — Sat, 31 May 2025 12:48:47 +0000

Organization: activist

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Web design, UI/UX design

The activist community is actively developing the platform activist.org, a platform that enables more people to safely engage in activism by making it easy to discover organizations and events as well as coordinate and collaborate on political action. We want to enable activists to learn proven and novel strategies from each other for social and ecological change. Free, open-source, privacy-focused and governed by our community.

We’re looking for general design support for the development of the platform. The current Figma designs can be found via the following link:

https://www.figma.com/design/I9McFfaLu1RiiWp5IP3YjE/activist_public_designs?node-id=805-231&t=d1juzOkj8Yev6h94-1

There are many parts of the designs that haven’t been finalized yet, and lots of minor issues that have been fixed in the code, but haven’t been updated in the designs. The goal would be to develop relationships with one or more designers so that we can collaborate as needed. The idea would be that we’d use our private Figma file and once designs are finished they’ll be moved over to the public one :)

How to Apply:

Andrew (Initiator)
- GitHub: https://github.com/activist-org - Figma designs: https://www.figma.com/design/I9McFfaLu1RiiWp5IP3YjE/activist_public_designs?node-id=805-231&t=CYrxkpVTdKfRei2n-1 - Website: https://activist.org/

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Scribe website media and application design support

Scribe — Sat, 31 May 2025 12:48:36 +0000

Organization: Scribe

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Web design, App design, UI/UX design

The Scribe community makes Wikidata powered language learning applications. Our main applications are an iOS and soon to be released Android application that has keyboards for second language learners with functionalities like translation, verb conjugation and noun annotation to learn genders. As a community we’re looking for design support to help us with the launch of our website at scri.be as well as designs for the applications that we work on. The current Figma designs can be found via the following link:

https://www.figma.com/design/c8945w2iyoPYVhsqW7vRn6/scribe_public_designs?node-id=405-464&t=O3gKSy9ty3eG7pUC-1

The goal would be to develop relationships with one or more designers so that we can collaborate as needed. The idea would be that we’d make a private Figma file and once designs are finished they’ll be moved over to the public one :)

How to Apply:

Andrew (Initiator)
- GitHub: https://github.com/scribe-org - Figma designs: https://www.figma.com/design/c8945w2iyoPYVhsqW7vRn6/scribe_public_designs?node-id=405-464&t=O3gKSy9ty3eG7pUC-1 - Website: https://scri.be/ (not released yet)

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FakeRedis branding (logo, documentation design, etc.)

fakeredis — Sun, 18 May 2025 13:10:34 +0000

Organization: fakeredis

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design and branding

FakeRedis has ~5 million downloads/month - it is heavily used by the python community and about time it has its own branding.

How to Apply:

Daniel
https://fakeredis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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FOSS Backstage 2025: wrap up

Eriol Fox — Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 10–12 March 2025

Location: Berlin, Germany

FOSS Backstage 2025 wrap up recap

Open Source Design @ FOSS Backstage

signs outside of FOSS Backstage's venue entrance

FOSS Backstage in 2025 has now been running since 2017 and FOSS Backstage Design is now in its second year. FOSS backstage is held in Berlin (and online) typically in early March and in 2025 it was held on March 10th and 11th and FOSS Backstage Design was on the 12th of March 2025.

This year, Open Source Design was able to support FOSS Backstage Design by using our community open collective fund to ensure the day had the same venue as FOSS Backstage’s main track. You can find more information about the costs on our Open Collective page as well as discussed in our monthly community meeting and the FOSS Backstage organisers maintained a forum thread in the lead up to the event

As for the decision to spend our funds this way, there were extensive discussions held by the core maintainer team in a group chat we maintain privately from the wider community in order to discuss any matters that would require secure conversations (e.g. so as not to risk leaking login information etc.) There were mixed views on supporting these costs but ultimately, when asked the majority of active core team maintainers for open source design as well as the wider community members asked in Jan 2025 / Feb 2025’s community meetings were in favour of Open Source Design using it’s collected funds to ensure that this event had a venue that was accessible to those that wanted to attend. Offering this funding also allowed us to speak a little on open source design’s mission and goals as a community to the audience in attendance and show public support for any organisation holding meetings, events and conferences that platform design in open source and open source design in the FOSS community.

This articles author (Eriol Fox) self-funded their own attendance to FOSS Backstage 2025 and FOSS Backstage Design 2025 so that they could write this article for Open Source Design’s community and also ensure that Open Source Design Community was represented at the event. Eriol is also part of the Program Committee of FOSS Backstage and has been for 2 years.

Read the recap from the FOSS Backstage conference organisers here

a speaker and the tech behind the speaker

The design talks for FOSS backstage

This year FOSS Backstage not only ran a day of design (FOSS Backstage Design) but also had a number of design talks throughout the main 2 day conference. These talks included topics around the usability of critical civic crisis technologies, how OSS organisations are understanding and building out their design processes for the wider community, the importance of cultural contexts with language orientation, design for command line interfaces and how open source designers are building out community learning resources so that more designers can be onboarded into OSS contribution.

Building Resilience:UX Strategies for Crisis-Responsive Tech by Miruna Muscan

Miruna shares the story behind Commit Global’s legal guidance module, designed from the ground up to address the urgent needs of refugees at the Ukrainian border. Built with inclusive UX principles, The legal guidance tool adapts to evolving needs in real time, making complex information accessible and straightforward. Through live testing, human-centered design, and research on the ground, Commit Global developed a humanitarian digital framework that doesn’t just respond to user needs, but rather it anticipates them. One of the key elements of Miruna’s talk is about how technology that really helps people is rarely the ‘cutting edge’ or trendy technology but rather technology that is user focused.

Watch Miruna Muscan’s talk here

Bridging the Gap Between Designers & Open Source Communities by Nina Rojc, Leia Ruffini, Kola Ojoodide

Nina, Leia and Kola explore the challenges of design contribution in open source projects and the issues faced by designers and maintainers. They conducted a survey with both designers and open source maintainers, as well as in-depth interviews with several designers to get a closer look at their experiences. In the talk they share key findings, including the biggest obstacles designers face - like the intimidating nature of contribution platforms, confusing documentation, and a lack of clear entry points. They then move onto practical strategies to overcome these challenges. These findings then inform work that the team hopes to share widely with the OSS community in order to alleviate some of the challenges identified in the surveys and interviews across the research.

Watch Nina, Leia and Kola’s talk here

Right-to-Left, Left-to-Right: Rethinking Multilingual Design by Batool Almarzouq, Goodnews Sunday Sandy, Richie Moluno

Batool, Goodnews and Richie detailed the importance of careful and considerate design of multilingual technologies. When designers create interfaces without an understanding how these interfaces are used and read in a language with a right-to-left reading direction like Arabic , there will be minor misunderstandings at best and a completely unusable technology/interface at worst. In addition, “default”, english-based text display and critical UI interaction elements can mislead a user (e.g. a ‘back’ button being placed in a top left or left hand side of the screen from left-to-right users). These default placements mean that those reading right-to-left are working harder to ‘figure out’ the logic of left-to-right reading and contexts. This talk is a must watch for those interested in fully inclusive design across languages.

Watch Batool, Goodnews and Richie’s talk here

Open Design Guide by Christoph Ono, Eriol Fox

This talk introduced the opendesign.guide which is a project created and maintained by designers across the bitcoin design community. The purpose of the open design guide grew from the speakers spending time over the years mentoring and supporting designers new to OSS to get into contributing. Both the speakers wished that there were public and comprehensive resources to help them through the mentoring process but writing guides and resources about how OSS works and how you can contribute design to OSS is nuanced and specific to each designer. Most of the problems then, with writing guides, is that a guide written by one designer about their perspective will not be broad enough for the wider OSS community. With the Open Design Guide, AI was used to write the first version and then it was edited, improved and built upon by holding ‘reading group’ community calls.

Watch Christoph and Eriol’s talk here

Designing is for GUIs only? CLI Design as a shared practice by Hartmut Obendorf

OSS projects are used to not having a designer. What would you ask one if you had them available? To look at your Command Line Interface? (CLI) This is exactly what you should do! In this talk, Hartmut goes into depth about how information architecture and conceptual architecture is critical in designing for command line interfaces . This dives deep into the use of ‘experts’ that interact with OSS primarily through prompts in the terminal. The command line is an environment that changes its state continuously, making a good design both important and challenging. Designing for command line interfaces also grapples with the assumption that ‘design’ is not needed, therefore advocating for usability and accessibility in the command line is difficult. Watch this talk to get some great guidance on how to start designing for text-based interfaces.

Watch Hartmut’s talk here

Onboarding Designers into Open Source Projects by Oluwadunsin Emmanuel Omole and Kingsley Mkpandiok

For Open Source Software, developer contributions are essential. While involvement of developers is often thought about, projects are not always prepared to integrate designers. This talk uses CHAOSS, the “Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software”, as a case study, exploring successful strategies used by the CHAOSS Africa design team to create an inclusive and productive environment for designers in open source. We will examine the specific challenges faced when integrating designers into a community primarily driven by developers, such as differing workflows, communication styles, and contribution processes.

Watch Oluwadunsin and Kingsley’s talk here

FOSS Backstage Design signed, sign

The design talks for FOSS Backstage Design

FOSS Backstage Design’s day kicked off with three fantastic talks by Martin Keary, Marta Marczykowska-Górecka and Tobias Bernard. All the speakers presented on common design in OSS topics but from their own unique experiences. There are common themes across the talks, from communication across role divides to both designers and developers getting intensely nerdy about their specific domains. The most common thread being that no matter what you’re contributing to the OSS, you’re there because you support free and open software and ultimately want it to be used, enjoyed and valuable to any user.

Achieving Excellence in Open Source Software Design by Martin Keary

Martin Keary aka Tantacrul kicked off FOSS Backstage Design with a talk that spanned both valuable general insights into design in open source alongside the specifics of designing for complex interfaces like Audacity in a way that is incremental and prioritised users’ quick visual understanding of the UI,reducing ‘pop up’ tools and designing more intuitive ways of expressing functions of an interface that matched the human expectations e.g. changing a ‘click to show toolbar to move an audio snippet’ to a click and drag ‘grabbing hand’ icon.. Martin also speaks to designing digital music notations that were accessible and legible both to advanced and new users with Musescore and some very funny moments from usertesting sessions with artist-users trying to puzzle out certain features in Inkscape.

Watch Martin Keary’s talk here

Beyond Looking Good: How To Talk To Developers About Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka

Marta, who is Qubes Manager, takes us through some of her experiences working with OSS developers, hackers and activists from the human rights OSS space. Marta speaks about how she advocates for humans in the OSS tech space, talking about how important communication is in the relationships between designers and developers and how to meet developers where they are at in terms of design understanding. Marta gives us practical advice on how to better connect with OSS developers and how to raise your voice as a designer in OSS.

Watch Marta Marczykowska-Górecka talk here

GNOME Design: A Report From the Trenches by Tobias Bernard

Tobias speaks about designing but also being embedded in the Gnome community. Tobias shows how design in FOSS allows it to break the constraints of only being for ‘nerds and hackers’. This evolves into how the design system for gnome applications has enabled both highly usable, accessible and consistent tools across the Gnome ecosystem while also removing the pain of styling those elements being the responsibility of developers. The design system also simplified the app icon design process through well established styles as well. Tobias goes into detail about the way that the design team are involved in projects in Gnome as well as the processes involved, from mock-up and design libraries to the upstream development.

Watch Tobias Bernard’s talk here

A circle of people discussing open source design topics at the barcamp

The FOSS Backstage Design ‘barcamp’ aka pitch a discussion topic and then vote!

After the talks we move into a ‘barcamp’ afternoon. All attendees had time to write what kinds of conversations and sessions they wanted to see happen for the remainder of the afternoon. These were then voted on and 3 sessions were run in parallel for 3 1 hour time slots. Notes were taken by volunteers and summaries can be found below.

The schedule written on a whiteboard

The selected topics are listed below with some sessions having summary notes and others that were more private do not have summaries

You can read the full collected notes hosted by FOSS Backstage .pdf here

The least you can do: The boring changes that improve UX quickly These tasks are easy to do because they are usually separate from complex coding work. Despite their value, they’re often ignored because they’re not as “exciting” as redesigns or new features. Examples of Small, High-Impact Fixes:

Accessibility (a11y) improvements – Increasing contrast between text and background.
Better labelling – Adding labels to icons, ensuring labels are clear and consistent.
Sharpening icons – Small visual refinements that improve clarity.
Tooltips & microcopy – Filling in missing descriptions to help users.
Consistent terminology – Ensuring naming is logical and standardized across the project.

Examples of Successful design work A private discussion where designers in FOSS projects spoke about projects they’ve had experience with and how they would describe and express ‘success’ in those projects.

Measuring design success in a FOSS project This discussion began with defining what success is or can be within any given OSS project. The discussion then moved on to how hard it is to measure success, communication sometimes stops after the design engagement, so designers don’t have access to feedback. This then moved onto values, principles, metrics and ways of gathering and finding feedback and how to see the bias in feedback.

Harmful UX patterns and their alternatives Various reasons for harmful UX patterns manipulating users like deliberate attempts to manipulate users to satisfy a business goal or accidental ones, because there isn’t enough knowledge/feedback. An example of UX pattern mentioned in one of the talks at FOSS Backstage: Creating addiction (getting people “hooked”).

“Marija: there is a dissonance that weaponizes the general principle of “keeping users engaged”, originally as a metric for product quality, which then becomes an aim to create a dependency, or create growth per se to satisfy shareholders.”

What are good starting points for designers moving into product design to support FOSS? New people need a point of contact – Without guidance, new contributors may not know where to start. Promote experienced community members who can help others get involved and small, achievable, and impactful tasks are ideal for newcomers to FOSS. Open-source repos should be structured clearly so contributors know where to report issues and submit fixes.

Find and rank issues for Penpot enterprise adoption This discussion focused on what we believe Penpot needs to implement to become a fully viable alternative design tooling option for ‘enterprise’ level organisations and companies. These implementations needs included: More options for feedback gathering beyond prototype link sharing and commenting, ways to justify/explain design decisions in designs, branching, approval and merging, tracking the history of design changes, fixing performance issues, implementing design tokens and having a lofi, wireframing mode.

CLI Design for Python One Design challenge is that CLIs are so easy to build for individual teams that it is very hard to create a unified appearance. There are different approaches to CLIs in Linux and no enforcement but could it help to push standards compliance to code-checking tools?

Privacy by design & Adversarial personas for FOSS A conversation that centered on privacy and security in FOSS projects and how those aspects are dealt with across tools/software. How can designers, typically side-lined in privacy and securities ‘deeper’ technical work, better understand how to address these concerns from a design perspective while establishing knowledge and standards for design.

How to be nice to each other in our community Private discussion centering on how to be supportive, collaborative and kind in a ‘scarcity’ environment like OSS and Design in OSS.

All the sticky note topics stuck on the whiteboard with dots to vote on the popular ones

Authors final thoughts

In the ‘post’-covid (is it over really?) era, where we saw many OSS foundations and organisations struggling to maintain already tightening budgets. Who now faces the onslaught of challenges to sustainability and existence across the rapidly changing (for the better?) tech ecosystem. It feels increasingly difficult to find events and communities carving out the space for the less prominent ways of supporting and contributing to OSS - design (and all of ‘designs’ subsidiary practices aka UI, UX, Usability, Accessibility, user research etc.). Maintaining design’s presence and relevancy to OSS continues to feel like pushing a boulder up a hill (in this author’s opinion). But the more we’re able to come together as a community of designers, around our commonalities as both designers in proprietary commercial spaces as well as open source software spaces, we can support the events and communities that support us, support not only our contribution labour, but also our advocacy and relevancy in OSS.

A sticky note that reads 'developers and designers, a match made in heaven/hell?

Credits and thanks

Thanks to the Open Source Design core maintainer team broadly and the wider community for discussing sponsoring FOSS Backstage.

Special thanks to the OSD maintainers and members in attendance Elio Qoshi, Jan Dittrich and Julia Racsko.

Thank you to Plain Schwarz (especially Alex, Paul, Sven & Anne) for organising FOSS Backstage and FOSS Backstage Design.

Thank you to the event photographer Jan Michalko the photos on Flickr can be found here

Written by Eriol Fox Proofread and edited by Jan Dittrich

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Create explanatory hero graphic for website

remoteStorage — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 11:15:12 +0000

Organization: remoteStorage

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Graphic Design, Illustration, Branding

There’s a big gaping hole on the frontpage of our website. It would be fantastic to have a graphic there, which would explain the concept of remoteStorage visually, and make the page more attractive and visually pleasing at the same time.

How to Apply:

Râu Cao
You can find everything on the website

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

UI/UX Designer

Nextcloud — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:52:43 +0000

Organization: Nextcloud

Status: closed

Compensation: paid

Role: UI/UX & interaction design

Nextcloud is an open source platform for collaboration and productivity, including things like voice & video chat, file sync & share, calendar, contacts, mail and an app ecosystem to do much more.

We’re looking for a UI/UX Designer to collaborate with our management team as well as our engineers to define and implement innovative solutions for product direction, visuals, and user experience. You will be part of the design team within engineering and design new features and improvements to our software, with focus on user-system interaction. You ideally have an interest in open source as well as understanding of software-enterprise business and are good at solving problems creatively, effectively and independently.

Responsibilities:

Conceptualize original ideas that bring simplicity and user-friendliness to complex design requirements
Execute all visual design stages from market research, through ideation and hand-off to engineering
Closely communicate and collaborate with relevant engineers
Create wireframes and mockups with specifications to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas
Conduct user research and evaluate user feedback
Establish and promote design guidelines, best practices, and standards
Manage delivery timelines, resources, and risk assessments

Requirements:

Degree in design, interaction design, or a related field is preferred.
UI/UX design experience with a strong portfolio and excellent visual design skills
Proficiency in design and prototyping tools such as Figma or Penpot
Up-to-date with the latest UI trends, techniques, and technologies
Analytical skills and ability to work in a complex environment
Can-do attitude and solution focus as well as committent and strong work ethic
Excellent communication skills in English, additional languages beneficial

What we offer:

A colourful team with a passion for open source
A product that pushes the boundaries of technology
A competitive salary
Flexibility for a healthy work-life balance
Remote first strategy – but you are welcome in our offices in Stuttgart or Berlin, if you like!

We are looking for somebody with ambition and drive, who would like to grow and learn. Send your CV to jobs@nextcloud.com, if you are interested in this role. We especially encourage applications by people from underrepresented groups in tech.

How to Apply:

Nextcloud job application email address
- The full jobs page with additional context https://nextcloud.com/jobs/ - Our design contribution page https://nextcloud.com/design/

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Second team member for user research

Forgejo — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:33:42 +0000

Organization: Forgejo

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Usability review & research

Forgejo is a self-hosted platform for software development (version tracking and project management).

Dear design community, I’m looking for assistance for my role in the Forgejo user research team. Currently, I’m the only member of that team, and I publicly called for help with my roles recently, because I cannot keep up with the work on my own.

So far, my work consisted of doing user research and user testing via live interviews as well as creating surveys, to learn more about the usage of Forgejo and similar platforms. The results have been recorded in a dedicated repository. The information is then used to influence design of new features and classify feature requests based on their expected value.

The results of user research have been overall handled respectfully by the Forgejo contributors, within the human capacity the project has to turn suggestions into actual improvements.

How to Apply:

[E-Mail](mailto:otto@codeberg.org), [Codeberg Profile: @fnetx](https://codeberg.org/fnetx), [Open Source Design Discourse](https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/u/fnetx/summary)
* My recent call for help: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/323 * Public repository for user research findings: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/user-research/ * Dedicated design repository for designing new features: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/design/ * Regular Forgejo issue tracker, example filter to only include issues that have been assigned the highest value due to user research: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues?labels=226640 * Forgejo contributor documentation: https://forgejo.org/docs/next/contributor/ * A welcome and motivation for contributors that I want to share: https://forgejo.org/docs/next/contributor/welcome/

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

UI/UX for grunf (wizard application)

grunf — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:06:47 +0000

Organization: grunf

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Interaction design and look and feel for an application

We’ve developed application called grunf when user inserts his/her data with his/her own structure and prints it with libre office writer or calc

How to Apply:

eduard.filipas@rhea.si
existing work can be found https://gitlab.com/stormfinger/grunf

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

UX Designer Needed to Create Design System (Material 3 or Alternatives)

The X ORB AB — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:23:00 +0000

Organization: The X ORB AB

Status: closed

Compensation: gratis

Role: UX Design

The X ORB AB is an innovative company focused on realizing groundbreaking semiconductor projects in 5G, IoT, and blockchain technology. We are seeking a dedicated and creative UX designer to help us develop a Design System, initially based on Google Material 3, but open to exploring other suitable options. This is a unique opportunity to shape our visual identity and create a world-class user experience. Your English skills are sufficient for good communication. It is a bonus if you have an understanding of the Swedish market.

You will:

Develop a Design System, with Google Material 3 as a starting point, but open to alternatives.
Contribute creative ideas and participate in discussions about design and user experience.
Collaborate with us to create a cohesive and user-friendly design.
Potentially assist in the redesign of existing interfaces into other open-source alternatives.
You will have access to our instance of Penpot.

We are primarily targeting the Swedish market.

How to Apply:

Henrik Allberg(founder)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-x-orb-ab/ https://thexorb.com

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Design our path to reclaiming digital privacy

privact — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:11:26 +0000

Organization: privact

Status: filled

Compensation: gratis

Role: CI - we need it all: website, Exhibition stands, graphics, sticker, app design...

With the non-profit organization privact e.V. we aim to overcome surveillance capitalism and reclaim digital privacy for all.

We are looking for volunteers to help us create our visual language (CI). This includes everything visual: our logo, website, infographics, merch, trade show booths, and of course the apps we create.

We also welcome less experienced designers. You will work closely with Björn, our project manager and experienced UX mentor.

Interested? Contact us and we will see if there is a match :)

How to Apply:

Björn

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSDEM 2025: Open Source Design Devroom wrap up

Eriol Fox — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1–2 February 2025

Location: Brussels, Belgium

FOSDEM 2025 recap - The Open Source Design community is still going strong!

Introduction

FOSDEM 2025 now marks the eleventh year that Open Source Design have applied for, and been able to run a devroom focused on Open Source, Design and the intersection of these.

The devroom in 2025 ran for a half a day on Sunday from 13.00pm until the end of the conference at 17.00pm. Most talks had a good/full turn out, apart from the one at the end of the day (many folks from overseas head home on Sunday evening!). We had 9 speakers total with 8 talks of 20 minutes each with 5 minutes for questions, though many talks could have been much longer and involved topics and Q&A was full of rich insights, perspective and discussions. All the talks were recorded and will be available on their individual pages on the FOSDEM website. https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/design/ (this website will be archived once FOSDEM 2026’s website is live. When that happens please search for ‘FOSDEM 2025’ in a search engine and look for the archived site)

One aspect of 2025 that this author is particularly proud of, is that we had a majority (7) people that were femme presenting/women speaking (and two masc presenting/men) speak at the Open Source Design devroom. This is a fantastic ratio in terms of diversity of genders to speak at an OSS conference.

The Talks

Design in 5 mins (okay, 20 mins): ecosystem mapping and user research? what is it and how to do it!

Design in 5 mins (okay, 20 mins): ecosystem mapping and user research? what is it and how to do it! Delivered by: Antonia Valencia Caroline Sinders Caroline and Antonia gave insights and personal experiences of how ecosystem maps and user research have benefited the OSS projects that they have been involved in. Including working on user research across a harassment procedure at Wikimedia.

Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System

Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System Delivered by: Laurel Terlesky Laurel walked us through building out the comprehensive and explorative design system for Thunderbird as well the aspirations the team have for more open source design contributions to the tool.

CLI Design for Designers and Developers

CLI Design for Designers and Developers Delivered by: Harmut Obendorf Harmut took us on a journey through the interfaces that developers and coders use and how to ensure that you are optimising the options at your disposal for making these interfaces the best experience for the specific circumstance.

From Accessibility to Inclusion - Interdisciplinary Design

From Accessibility to Inclusion - Interdisciplinary Design Delivered by: Raashi Saxena Raashi takes us through the differences between accessibility and usability, along with ways in which the two complement and support each other in the design of open source tools and the unique opportunities open source communities have for serving disable user needs.

Piracy, and Open Source: Reimagining Creativity

Piracy, and Open Source: Reimagining Creativity Delivered by: Zekun Yang A fantastic personal account from Zekun on her journey as a designer using the proprietary tools pressed upon us as designers and the opportunities and expectations open source design tooling can have on design and designers. Shining light on the cultural differences across countries and the inequalities present in our tools.

Towards Free-Fair-Patterns: Free to Use, Free from Deceptive Patterns, Fair for All

Towards Free-Fair-Patterns: Free to Use, Free from Deceptive Patterns, Fair for All Delivered by: Lorena Sánchez Chamorro Lorena explores the ways in which we practice design in both manipulative and anti-manipulative ways and how we can strive for better treatment of users using fair patterns and ethical interfaces.

The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source Projects

The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source Projects Delivered by: Khushi Garg Khushi takes us through their experiences from engineer to designer before and during their time at Red Hat as a product designer. Inviting us to better understand the perspectives all roles can bring to the creation and betterment of OSS.

XWiki: Improving web accessibility with respect to backward compatibility

XWiki: Improving web accessibility with respect to backward compatibility Delivered by: Lucas C

Lucas closes the open source design devroom this year by taking us through his journey in making XWiki more accessible without breaking the backwards compatibility of the experience and technology. Quotes from attendees

What the audience said…

This year, many folks approached the volunteers at the devroom with comments, thanks and support requests. Here are some of those quotes from people that came to the OSD devroom:

“I’ve been coming to FOSDEM for 10 years and the open source design devroom is one of the best rooms”

“I’m looking to change from software development to UX design and I didn’t think it was possible until after this Dev room”

“The open source design devroom is one of the most accessible devrooms in terms of topic. I might not understand design in the same way as designers but I can always understand and appreciate the topics in the room”

“I’ve been coming to the open source design devroom for the last 3-4 years and I’m so glad there are other designers doing work in this space and are excited to speak about it”

If you’d like to send us a review or quote from your experience of the FOSDEM Open Source Design devroom please email us on core@opensourcedesign.net - feedback, compliments and critique is how we keep our volunteer energy up year on year and we always hope to improve experiences of people at FOSDEM as best we can.

You can also email us if you’d like to be involved in the Open Source Design Devroom as a volunteer next year. We always need help with the following:

Applying for the FOSDEM devroom and stand in September/October every year
Promoting the call for talks to people in the open source design space
Helping up develop fundraising processes for travel stipends and raising funds to distribute to speakers and volunteers
Communications and liaising with selected speakers ensuring they have their talks prepared and everything they need to attend FOSDEM in Brussels.
Volunteering in the Devroom at FOSDEM in Brussels. Hosting the room, Introducing speakers, tech and audio support, ensuring the room is safe and space is monitored and cleanup.
Preparing banners, posters and stickers for handing out to attendees.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Logo design & Branding Oppurtunity – FOSS game project

PySeas — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:11:24 +0000

Organization: PySeas

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: Logo design, branding.

Organization: PySeas (soon to be PyCeas) Status: Searching Date Posted: January 26, 2025 Tagged as: Logo, Branding, Pixel Art

Hey all, I’m rewriting this post because the game design document wasn’t working properly.

Something also came up with the new project name - it’s going to be slightly different! The current project name PySeas will officially change to PyCeas. This clever nod to Pisces, the zodiac sign of the fish, connects the sea to the stars, symbolizing both adventure and mystery. The alternate spelling makes it unique while keeping its pronunciation and meaning intact. (Fun fact: It’s also my constellation!) My brother came up with the name.

Skills:

Experience in pixel art & branding.

Ability to create simple yet effective branding elements.
Understanding of scalability for various uses (social media, GitHub, game assets, etc.).
Familiarity with game branding is a plus!

Compensation:

This is an unpaid, open-source project, but you’ll receive full credit in the game, documentation, and all related materials.

Interested? Let’s collaborate!

How to Apply:

dgsaiu@proton.me
* Join the discussion on GitHub: [Project Discussion](https://github.com/ultimateownsz/PySeas/discussions/94) * Check out the **Game Design Document (GGD)** for more details: [GGD.md](https://github.com/ultimateownsz/PySeas/blob/main/docs/Game%20Design%20Document/GGD.md)

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Designing the logo, conference website and sponsorship brochure

PyCon India 2025 — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 07:11:37 +0000

Organization: PyCon India 2025

Status: closed

Compensation: paid

Role: logo design, web design, branding

We require designs of our conference logo, designs and wireframes for our website, content layout templates for our blog, designs for a sponsorship brochure and a few other related assets for the general theme and design of the conference.

For sample, our past few year’s websites: https://in.pycon.org/2024/ https://in.pycon.org/2023/

PyCon India is the premier conference for Python enthusiasts and professionals, offering an unparalleled opportunity to dive deep into the world of Python and explore its limitless potential. PyCon India is a volunteer driven conference and the 2025 edition will be the 16th one to be hosted in India. We are a completely volunteer run non-profit event.

Although we are all volunteers running this conference, we have some budget to pay for the design work.

How to Apply:

Nabarun Pal (Conference Chair - PyCon India 2025)
https://in.pycon.org/

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Need help with branding for FOSS game

PySeas — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 18:39:21 +0000

Organization: PySeas

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: logo design & branding

Our project aims to create a pirate themed 2D, topdown, turn based boardgame in Pygame.

The new project name with the most votes by our community is Pyces. So I think that could become our new project’s name.

The game will utilize pixelart and needs to represent a logo or rebrand to the new github organization structure.

How to Apply:

opensourcedesign.version657@passmail.net
https://github.com/ultimateownsz/PySeas/discussions/94 , https://github.com/ultimateownsz/PySeas/blob/main/docs%2FGame%20Design%20Document%2FGGD.md ,

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Orchard Core CMS admin UX revamp

Orchard Core — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 01:43:26 +0000

Organization: Orchard Core

Status: closed

Compensation: paid

Role: web design

We’re looking for a UX professional to renew the admin (dashboard) experience of the CMS Orchard Core, i.e. where the owners of a site edit content, manage users, change settings, etc. If you enjoy open-source, have worked with such projects before, and perhaps want to get your name on another one as a contributor, then this can be you! (Being a developer, even a frontend one, is NOT necessary, we’d write the code. But if you do code, then all the better.)

Orchard Core is an open-source, community-driven framework and CMS built on ASP.NET Core. It’s among the most active .NET open-source projects.

The admin looks something like this currently. We don’t think we want to rebuild it down to the last pixel, but rather, we’d need new foundations, better ways for the usual, common UI elements (like navigation, notifications, forms…), and guidelines on how to keep it consistent. The goal is for us to have a modern admin UX that’s functional, convenient, and unobtrusive, and something that ordinary contributors can extend by following patterns. We don’t want to have to awkwardly explain to newcomers that, well, this was built by developers for developers, don’t expect top UX on the admin, it’s rough not just around the edges.

How to Apply:

Zoltán Lehóczky (one of the maintainers)
https://docs.orchardcore.net/en/latest/contributing/ https://docs.orchardcore.net/en/latest/reference/branding/

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Logo for an opensource Java framework

Latte — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 18:37:49 +0000

Organization: Latte

Status: expired

Compensation: paid

Role: Logo design & Branding

I’m looking for a kind person that could deliver a logo for my Java framework ;) I’m working on a project after hours, releasing it under MIT license.

I’m doing a port of this library: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea So they are having this nice logos for all of their libraries - I need something in similar fasion :)

How to Apply:

Lukasz
https://github.com/flatscrew/latte https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

A better design for the mobile-app

ecmbReader — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:17:02 +0000

Organization: ecmbReader

Status: expired

Compensation: gratis

Role: App-design

I need a design for a tecnical finished eBook-Reader app. That means the layout is done, but the colors and shapes of the elements are horrible. a new app-icon would be also cool.

I have Screenshots of every screen, fonts and icons, a working demo-app, and of course demo-files.

About the Project: Its an open-source project for a new file-format specially for manga and comic ebooks. The app itselve ist NOT open source, but free to use without adds or collectig data, coz I couldn’t find a license which forbids comercial usage

How to Apply:

Clemens
https://ibb.co/xCGy9v9

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2025

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1st February 2025

Time: 13:00 CET

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

The call for proposals has now closed! please wait until mid December to see the final talks selected! Thank you to everyone who submitted :))))

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After the success of FOSDEM 2024, we are gearing up for the next edition of FOSDEM, taking place at the Université Libre Brussels on 1st and 2nd of February 2025.

Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

Open Source Design has been part of FOSDEM for close to a decade now, giving designers who work with free, libre and open source software a platform to share their ideas. Much like the previous years, Open Source Design will have a devroom at FOSDEM 2025 for the afternoon of Sunday the 2nd of February, and this year it will on the second half of the second day of FOSDEM (13:00pm CET). It will be an in-person event, with a livestream online for the folks who are unable to make it in person.

Get involved!

We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!

Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:

Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!

Some examples of previous talks featured at the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM are:

Thunderbird: Why Visual Change Is Good by Alessandro Castellani at FOSDEM 2024

Reimagining Personal Computing with E ink: Community Insights and Design Challenges by Alexander Soto at FOSDEM 2024

Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt by nojhan at FOSDEM 2024

Bad UX is Bad Security: Adventures in Qubes OS UX Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka at FOSDEM 2024

Web-accessibility for open-source privacy & security tools by Raashi Saxena at FOSDEM 2024

Penpot 2.0 is here! by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz at FOSDEM 2024

Accessibility & Open Source: How open source is key to building a more inclusive world by Mike Gifford at FOSDEM 2023

Documenting a Design System: Lessons learned from open sourcing the Orbit docs by Aaron Collier at FOSDEM 2022

Open Source Design movement in Africa by Peace Ojemeh at FOSDEM 2020

What is the talk format?

This year, all talks at the Open Source Design devroom will be in-person and recorded/streamed. You will have the stage for 25 minutes in total, so you can have a 20-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions from the audience, or a 25-minute talk with no questions. Talks cannot be longer than 25 mins otherwise you get gently moved off ‘stage’.

How can I submit a talk?

Link to submit a talk Submissions open on the 30th of October and run until 30th of November 2024.

Talk submissions will be sent directly to FOSDEM’s Pretalx system. Submissions for talks must select ‘Open Source Design’ under ‘Track’.

There the Open Source Design Core Maintainer team will review talks and accept and reject. We should have space for around 6 talks in the afternoon.

What’s the deadline?

Submission of talks must be done by the end of day 30th of November 2024

Accepted talks would be announced latest in December 2024.

All deadlines are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.

Additional information

The Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM 2025 will be at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels, Belgium, the room is k3201 with a capcity of 80 people. Those who want to watch remotely will be able to attend virtually.

Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Open Source Design forum.

We are looking forward to seeing you at FOSDEM 2025!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design

How to Join

Communicating well

Participation channels

Social media

Community call

Discourse forum

GitHub

Ways to contribute

Contribute design work

Come to events

Support us financially

What membership looks like

Links

Resources directory

Projects 20

Icons 16

Fonts 11

Images 11

Creative Commons media 4

Design tools 18

Color 6

CSS frameworks 8

Design reads 11

Open source design reads 6

Community & inspiration 10

Learn to code 9

Learn to design 3

Bibliography

Why one should be familiar with projects and their structure

Typical Tasks in open source design

Improve Labels

What is this?

How does it help?

Example: Don’t use implementation langauge in labels

When and why does it work?

Resources

Improve Icons

What is this?

How does it help?

When and why does it work?

Resources

Layout of existing dialogs

What is this?

How does it help?

Example: Use semantically correct widgets

When and why does it work?

Suggesting new features

What is this?

How does it help?

Example: Trash in Penpot

When and why does it work?

Tools and Code

Issue trackers

Code

Git

Mailing lists

UX support/input working with disabled people to help design the next version of the fastest text entry system

UI/UX Redesign for Therapy Worker Cooperative webpage

Gnome HIG compliant icon (SVG) for PDF utility app Quire

UX Designer

Monoshape logo - favicon ready

Create visual identity, branding and catchy name

The ArcOS project

UI/UX Designer for Open Source F1 Widget App

Recruiting Digital Illustrator - Freelance position

Your Role

Commitment

We’re Looking For

Membership Requirement

Future Opportunities

Application

Home page design for our No To Big Tech movement

Open Source Design: Governance research and documentation project

Help fund the recordings of talks for FOSS Backstage Design 2026

Homepage Redesign

FOSDEM 2026: Open Source Design Devroom wrap up

Introduction

The Talks

Designing attestations UI: The Security and Safety of OSS package supply chain - Eriol Fox