 Hello everyone. Good afternoon. So, I'll start with asking a simple question, which is quite obvious considering we are in an open source conference. So, how many of you have or have been contributing to open source? Can you please raise your hand? Awesome. Almost everybody I see. But how many of those contributions were not code related? Anybody? Yeah. Only a few, right? So, that is what I'm going to talk about. So, about me, who am I and why I'm talking about, what I'm talking about today. So, I am a freelance product slash UI UX designer currently, and last year I interned with Outreachy, which is an open source program. So, I interned with them last year and worked on an application called ODKX. So, that's what I'm going to talk about. Okay. So, first question, can I even do design contributions in open source? So, yes, definitely. The main reason is that there are little to no contributions from designers usually in open source. If you've ever organized or handled an open source project, you'll realize that organizations often require more than just code, more than just code contributions. So, especially for beginners, they can start contributing even as a writer, designer, community manager, and much more. You can also contribute to documentation, make tutorials, participate in community discussions, and events, etc. But, is it really even needed? I would say definitely a big yes, since developers are not trained in design. They can make things work, but from a user point of view, to improve the overall UI and UX, to make it simpler for the user, I think it's very important for designers to also start contributing to open source. Also, for newbies especially, since almost in every field, it is a little difficult to get started, to get your first opportunity. So, it can be a great value add to a newbies portfolio, where if they've contributed to a real-time, real-world project, they can add it to their portfolio and gain some valuable experience. Some things that they should keep in mind, or we as non-code contributions should keep in mind, is about the target audience, who they are designing for, what kind of users are going to use that particular project, or app, or whatever. The platform, is it a web-based application, or a mobile application, the budget, and the timeline. Open source projects can be tight on the budget and timeline, so it is very important to keep that in mind as well. The most important thing, what kind of contributions can be done? So, there are a lot of type of designers as well. So, for graphic designers, they can get started with designing logos, icons. For artists and illustrators, they can do illustrations. For UI UX designers, like me, you can design websites, mobile apps. Designers can also help in branding, and design systems. So, not to confuse design systems with system design. So, design system is like a guide, or a collection of all the details about a particular project. Let's say what font is used in the project, what colors are used, et cetera. One of the most important things, I feel, what challenges can you expect to face, and how to overcome them? So, I feel, whatever, from my experience, I would say, lack of communication and ownership can be a hurdle in an open-source project. We are usually expected to communicate via email lists or comments on the issues itself. So, in case you are looking for feedback or some feedback and things quite early, it can be a bit difficult. So, for that, how you can overcome is just be proactive and patient, right? And second challenge that I feel is lack of resources. Again, as I mentioned that open-source projects can have a tight budget of sorts, especially for the design part of it, right? So, you just have to be creative and resourceful. You can find free and open-source design tools and resources, you will get free icons, icons, icon packs, illustrations, et cetera, easily. I have linked some of those here. How should I get started? So, how I got started is I just searched on GitHub these keywords, like design, logo, or UI UX. So, sometimes project maintainers have issues already open, which mention these keywords like we are looking for a redesign for our app or we need a logo for our app. So, you can easily find those using these keywords on GitHub. Another thing is if you are already interested in a certain project, even if they do not have a design issue opened, you can still go ahead and suggest them certain changes or whatever you feel can be improved overall in the design UI UX or even documentation and things like that. A second is this community called open-sourcedesign.net. They are a community of open-source designers and they regularly share resources, tips and tricks and also like small issues and jobs related to open-source design. Okay, what are the opportunities? So, here I've mentioned some of the most well-known open-source programs out there, which like when I got started, I did not know that you could be a part of them even if you don't code, right? So, Outreachy is the one I was a part of and Outreachy, they conduct their internship twice a year and yeah, so they have around 20% non-code related projects that you can apply to. GSOC, Google Summer of Code, a very popular one. They also have a lot of non-code related projects that you can apply to. Hacktoberfest, a very famous one again, it is conducted in October every year and last year I also submitted some design contributions and I was a part of Hacktoberfest as a designer, not a coder basically. And the last one is Bitcoin, this is a pretty new one and unlike other three, they have a dedicated design track. So, either you can go ahead with the program as a developer or as a designer, they have a separate track altogether. For rest three, they just have a certain section of non-code related or design related projects that you can contribute to. Yeah, so finally, just some bonus tips, just because you are working on open-source you are feeling like you're working for free, make sure your work is still high quality. Make sure your work is easy to use because even after you are done contributing, even after you've stopped contributing to the project, designers and developers and most importantly, users after you will be using it. So, make sure it is easy to use. Also, documentation, documenting your work and process, I feel is very important, even for the project that you're contributing to, so that in future, if another person is trying to reference the same thing, they can easily understand and build upon it and promote your work. So, unlike most companies where people work at, you do not have any NDA or anything for open-source projects. So, feel free to promote your work, add it to your portfolio and yeah, make your work work for you. So, yeah, that was about it. Thank you. So, full request, the GitHub, mainly, etc. What's our suggestions for design work? Because if you work in open-source environment, you ideally want to have the same ideology for design work as well. Yeah, so what I have worked on is like, I submit a design suggestion, let's say maybe I feel that this particular screen or this particular flow can be improved. So, I maybe sketch it out or design it in Figma and submit that file on issues that I feel this can be incorporated and then that issue can later be assigned to a developer to work upon it. So, how do I track the design variations or versions on that? So, again, Figma also has the version history thing or we can also post, I think, multiple links of sorts. There is nothing like GitHub for design yet. So, yeah, that's what we got to do. Yeah, yeah. So, open-source alternatives for most of the tools, let's say I was talking about Figma, right? So, Figma is also not open-source, it is not free for use. So, when I was working with Outreachy as a designer interning there, so that was one of the challenges that I faced. I was very comfortable with Figma, but they informed me that this is not something you can use because it's not open-source and we are in open-source organization. So, then I had to go and look for more open-source alternatives, learn it maybe quickly. But, yeah, there are a lot of resources and software available. It's just not that popular yet. So, yeah, Penpot, yeah. Penpot, P-E-N-P-O-T, Penpot.