The open source world needs more designers.

tracker1 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of open-source doesn't have a process to integrate and follow a design strategy from a designer. A business can mandate that work be done to adapt/follow a given design strategy... for open-source it's often harder to do so... and even then you face the same or more resistance to change.

It took basically a corporate control for Audacity to make its' difficult transition to a better design from its' mediocre one. That said, I'd love to see something modern transformed from The Gimp's core in a similar way. That doesn't even begin to cover what you might want in terms of inter-app collaboration...

KdenLive, Blender, Gimp, Krita, InkScape, Audacity and other tooling, as an example, all use different UI/UX base libraries, and no clean way to cross-integrate features between them if someone wanted to assemble an open-source Adobe alternative. There's no baseline equivalent to even MS/Office's use of COM/DCOM for interoperability.

	▲	esafak 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Good points. Designers need to be first-class citizens whose input is sought early on, not to attempt to make a purse out of the finished pig's ear. RFCs are a venue for this. Designers, for their part, need to share their ready-to-go libraries in all the popular frontend frameworks. The two could also collaborate on developing tools to automate design linting, similar to automated code review programmers use.

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homebrewer 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Looking at what they did to commercial software that used to have excellent, high density UIs, maybe they should stay where they are.

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nico 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For the past week or so I’ve been using pencil.dev and I’m impressed. It’s like a local Figma that connects to Claude code or cursor, and you can just ask it to design stuff

It definitely has its bugs and it eats up tokens/context like crazy. But it make product development so much easier and faster, while providing great design