On Sat, 2014-12-13 at 16:55 +0100, Xaviju Julián wrote:
Hi inkscape devs,
We are a group of UX, UI designers and front-end devs from Kaleidos, a company from Madrid, Spain. We are also designers and developers of the open source tool Taiga.io. We use inkscape in our everyday work and we love it, so we would like to collaborate with our expertise to help make it even better.
Glad to hear you love Inkscape! We would love to have you collaborate with us.
Some months ago, we started to think on how we could improve usability and design in inkscape and other open source tools. We found out that inkscape improved in the last years, but still have some issues. We made some initial wireframes and designs, but nothing has been developed until now.
Can you share you observation and your designs?
In our company we enjoy a free week every six months to work and collaborate (or develop) in open source projects. This week is called ΠWEEK [a.k.a. Personal innovation week] (piweek.com). This ΠWEEK we decided to focus on inkscape to do a first approach on how could look the inkscape we would love in terms of look & feel as designers and front-end devs.
I think most current Inkscape developers recognize that our UI could use some serious work. Most of it has been added piece-meal over the years with out much thought about consistency.
Of course, we know that is hard work and it is not just designing it so we decided to write to the list to get some advice on how to collaborate in the best way possible for designers and developers and hopefully fit in the inkscape development roadmap.
I would not worry about fitting into the road map. UI work is probably pretty independent of the work covered there.
For collaboration... let us know when is your next ΠWEEK. Join the IRC channel on 'inkscape-devel' on 'freenode'.
Even if this week we will probably be doing just a creative exercise it would be amazing if we could get some parts of this work and focus on it in a longer term to be part of the inkscape development roadmap for the future with your feedback and fitting in the inkscape needs and conditions.
I am not sure what level of contributing you are thinking about. Are you thinking about just design work or actually contributing code?
If the former case, while UX/UI design work is definitely needed, getting it implemented is probably going to be hit or miss. We have a rather small group of core developers, all volunteer, who may or may not get excited enough to implement the designs.
In the latter case, you can pretty much be assured that your design work will make it into Inkscape. We have a fairly low threshold for handing out commit access (two accepted patches).
It will be amazing if you show us what is the best way to contribute, what would be your needs and how we could be part of this amazing community.
Soon we will publish the result and hopefully we get some feedback as well.
Looking forward to it!
Tav