<story><title>Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?</title><url>http://forrst.com/posts/Designers_how_do_we_get_you_guys_to_contribute-gVn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vog</author><text>On the other hand, maybe we should make designers &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to use Git.&lt;p&gt;This might be not as crazy as it sounds, as I recently learned:&lt;p&gt;A few weeks ago, there was a short presentation about Git, targeted at non-programmers such as graphics and web designers. After the presentation, one of the designers (who apparently already knew about Git) stood up and criticized the presenter for not going deeper into branches and auto-branching.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the presenter intentionally left that topic out, in order to not confuse all those Git newbies.&lt;p&gt;However, the designer argued that this is what would make Git interesting for designers. He said that all this diff/commit/push/pull stuff was boring for designers where a &quot;diff&quot; between graphics files is neither readable nor meaningful, and where automatic merges are impossible anyway. But branching has the power to reflect the natural work-flow of a designer who permanently goes back to previous versions in order to try different variants. Reflecting this via &quot;Save as ...&quot; (and naming files accordingly) is very cumbersome.&lt;p&gt;Although I personally think this guy overrated the power of branches, this might change once the Git user interfaces becomes simpler to use, more targeted to designers (rather than just software developers) and better integrated into graphical tools like Gimp, Inkscape or even Photoshop.</text></item><item><author>Sirupsen</author><text>Yes, version control definitely seems like one of the biggest gaps. The communication between developers and designers have to improve, and the developers will have to realize they can&apos;t ask every designer for commits, but they can probably ask them for .zip files.</text></item><item><author>pieter</author><text>My girlfriend tried to design an icon for an open-source app she uses, but the experience hasn&apos;t been really great. I think the way developers in open-source projects communicate doesn&apos;t really work with designers.&lt;p&gt;She sent the photoshop source file and a png to the mailing list, but was told to send in a patch instead, which meant she had to learn how to use git to check out the repository, add the icon to the repo, and then generate a git patch. Only after that, she was told that they couldn&apos;t use the photoshop source file because they didn&apos;t have photoshop. Finally, one of the developers imported the file into the GIMP, changed some stuff on the icon without discussion, botched the output and then added that to the project. That was enough for her to not try doing something like this again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jianshen</author><text>Source control is also not part of a designer&apos;s natural workflow because the options aren&apos;t that great (usually backups on a NAS is all there is and a few proprietary snapshot plugins from Adobe. Kaleidoscope looks the most interesting). Also, svn branch numbers or git hashes don&apos;t make nearly as much sense to designers as &quot;HiFi Mockup iPhone4 Right Aligned Inbox.ai&quot; when they want to backtrack or compare current &quot;in the running&quot; designs.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d love to see the OSS community develop better source control software targeted towards designers. :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?</title><url>http://forrst.com/posts/Designers_how_do_we_get_you_guys_to_contribute-gVn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vog</author><text>On the other hand, maybe we should make designers &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to use Git.&lt;p&gt;This might be not as crazy as it sounds, as I recently learned:&lt;p&gt;A few weeks ago, there was a short presentation about Git, targeted at non-programmers such as graphics and web designers. After the presentation, one of the designers (who apparently already knew about Git) stood up and criticized the presenter for not going deeper into branches and auto-branching.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the presenter intentionally left that topic out, in order to not confuse all those Git newbies.&lt;p&gt;However, the designer argued that this is what would make Git interesting for designers. He said that all this diff/commit/push/pull stuff was boring for designers where a &quot;diff&quot; between graphics files is neither readable nor meaningful, and where automatic merges are impossible anyway. But branching has the power to reflect the natural work-flow of a designer who permanently goes back to previous versions in order to try different variants. Reflecting this via &quot;Save as ...&quot; (and naming files accordingly) is very cumbersome.&lt;p&gt;Although I personally think this guy overrated the power of branches, this might change once the Git user interfaces becomes simpler to use, more targeted to designers (rather than just software developers) and better integrated into graphical tools like Gimp, Inkscape or even Photoshop.</text></item><item><author>Sirupsen</author><text>Yes, version control definitely seems like one of the biggest gaps. The communication between developers and designers have to improve, and the developers will have to realize they can&apos;t ask every designer for commits, but they can probably ask them for .zip files.</text></item><item><author>pieter</author><text>My girlfriend tried to design an icon for an open-source app she uses, but the experience hasn&apos;t been really great. I think the way developers in open-source projects communicate doesn&apos;t really work with designers.&lt;p&gt;She sent the photoshop source file and a png to the mailing list, but was told to send in a patch instead, which meant she had to learn how to use git to check out the repository, add the icon to the repo, and then generate a git patch. Only after that, she was told that they couldn&apos;t use the photoshop source file because they didn&apos;t have photoshop. Finally, one of the developers imported the file into the GIMP, changed some stuff on the icon without discussion, botched the output and then added that to the project. That was enough for her to not try doing something like this again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>random42</author><text>&amp;#62; On the other hand, maybe we should make designers want to use Git.&lt;p&gt;I use Git, and its a wonderful piece of software craft indeed, but it does not have Windows/Mac clients, that designers often use, as their base OS.&lt;p&gt;A decent usable frontend for Git, on platforms other than Linux too, needs to be developed, for it to be usable by designers.&lt;p&gt;Edit - I meant to say officially supported frontend and support for other oses by git.</text></comment>