I spent time volunteering for Gnome many years ago (2.x days), and it was extremely hard there, even though it had a reputation for being one of the most designer friendly open source projects. It was a struggle to push for design considerations with obvious benefits such as accessibility - let alone anything remotely resembling aesthetics.
The issue with open source is that ultimately, the project maintainers tend to be programmers with programmers’ priorities and views on design.
Good design requires consistent, thoughtful sacrifice and compromise, and someone at the top to enforce it. If the open source UI squad makes recommendations that the Gimp maintainers choose to ignore, then what?
For example, you could decide to move some functionality from a sidebar to a context menu. this implies reprogramming the interface very differently; a skin can't do that. This also implies prototyping a lot. So basically the designer and the coder have to sit together quite a lot, that's not easy when you communicate via internet.
Having some side projects or helping OSS is somewhat expected from a programmer. From other professions not so much.
- High visibility: The game was featured in the website sidebar. So I thought it'd be neat to contribute.
- Easy as HTML: Extract game zip file, edit Python files in a text editor, plug in my own filenames instead of the default ones. Start game, see my graphics.
- Developer was very open and friendly. Just an IT guy with a hobby.
- I knew about the Pygame website already because I followed FOSS stuff.
I don't know how many UI designers are browsing sites like that, but my guess is not many. But imagine if they did: what are the chances their workflow would be as easy as it was for me? In a compiled language, forget it.
I remember a few years back when suddenly it seemed like everything was on GitHub. My UI designer peers _hated_ this and many still do. So it's far from inviting in many ways for a UI person, though I don't mean to suggest they couldn't hack it if they wanted to.
What about it do they hate? I ask as a non-designer, to whom their perspective may be foreign.
Imagine code diffs, but for visual designs instead. Showing you which palette colors have changed, which margins have been tweaked etc. - Github doesn’t do any of that.
In any case, is it that insane to imagine a visual diff tool? Illustrator files are basically just SVG, it’s all very parseable.
https://github.com/makezonefablab/MakersBook01_MusicBox/comm...
In general one should not use PSD in an open source project, because it requires costly proprietary software. Also does not run on Linux
But that's different from helping an (OSS) application look good. For that, you have to make tons of mockups, iterate again and again, until you have something that looks good and consistent across the entire application. Ideally, you'd also want at least one other person to bounce ideas back and forth, and have an opinion about what you're doing.
This is real work, which requires a lot of commitment upfront. The equivalent of requiring a programmer to lay out the entire architecture before they write a single line of code. That's also something that mainly happens in a corporate environment, whereas for hobby projects it tends to lead to frustration.
In the case of Audacity, I remember that I have to google how to silence a selection every time I get back to it after a break of several months. I guess this means that the primary goal is somewhat missed.
There's always a cost to contributing. The cost gets bigger as the project gets bigger. This is totally unsurprising.
This is why people contribute more to software they use. You don't generally jump ships and help random projects for the sake of it.
You don't need experienced UI designers to fix these low hanging issues, yet.
I've used Audacity for simple stuff but for a long time. IMHO it's very convienent. I don't dispute it could be prettier, but usability is good.