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