Hi all! I missed last week’s call- came an hour late, oops! Thankfully Eriol was kind enough to talk to me about SustainOSS. For context, I came here because I’ve been in recent OSD calls.
What is design’s role in less UI based OSS e.g. scientific OSS command line?
- This is a question I’ve been asking designers, developers and data scientists
- Some suggestions include
- Documentation, especially to explain to newcomers or convince people to contribute
- ‘How to find yourself in the code’ for NumPy (a computational Python library)
- Marketing of OSS projects
- Illustrated newsletter: updates and community news about NumPy in 2022
- Promotional material at conferences
- Documentation, especially to explain to newcomers or convince people to contribute
Some cool design work I’ve done is… comics! Specifically ‘Alt Text for Scientific Diagrams and Documentation’.
This started because writing alt text for histograms, bar charts, etc requires different guidelines than general images. eg “A cow wearing a blue cap” vs “A normalized histogram with 50 bins and variance… on the X axis… on the Y axis…”
As a designer, I can’t help but make illustrations to explain these concepts. Eventually, at our in-person company retreat, I distributed printed zines!
Here is a digital version: Camp_Quansight_2022_Alt_Text_Zine_Mars_Lee.pdf - Google Drive
Preview page:
Comics are one way designers could contribute to OSS. It’s a little unusual, but reception had been great! People said they’re were very engaging. A lot of developers are into comics so geek culture has been a great way to connect.
Comics/zines already have some presence: wizardzines, Bubblesort Zines, Grokking Algorithms, Erika Heidi.
Physical media, such as zines, has also been great in getting developer buy-in. Not always possible, but certainly makes a splash.
Looking forward to the next call- got the time right this time!