Getting to Good Design with Open Source Projects.

Getting Design to work with open source projects isn't always easy, it requires decisions to be made by those that know what they are doing. Unfortunately giving everyone an opinion on the project can frustrate and eventually stall out the interest of even the most patient designer. For the most part I am focusing on smaller or newer open source projects. Larger open source efforts bend the ear of a great designer because there is a lot of momentum and attention behind the project.

In most cases with an open source project, a programmer can add or edit components to the project to improve functionality or remove bugs. This works well for a project, but with branding and look and feel designers are in a precarious position to construct a solid and effective brand identity or user interface.

There is not really a client in this case, in most situations, it is a group of developers. These developers work on code, their specialty is not focused in this area, it would be comparative to having graphics designers make the decisions for architecting a piece of software. Granted if there is a decision maker in the project, basically the people that started the project some such position or project leader, you can work with them as the client. However it would benefit the open source community in general to try and promote more of a responsability for designers to get a good look and feel and hand it off more to these specialists to make good decisions for the project as a whole. This is starting to happen more and more as whole all over the internet and to stay competitive with proprietary software packages, it is almost critical to help make open source projects look as slick as their counterparts.