[adev]

I'm seeing a lot of the replies here are only thinking about designers working on the final visuals of a project. While, yes, a designer might make the icon better than a developer, what about the actual interaction processes that designers often define? Those can be system level changes that need developers to do, which means the designers need to be working along side, or ahead of developers, not after.

Too often when I try open source software I see just a default list of options that really makes no sense, or I often see the developers trying to accommodate every need that might exist, resulting in overly complex user interfaces.

It takes someone (a designer usually) with knowledge of human interaction to know when a toolbar with multiple tabs works or when to keep it simple. Without doing this, designers are (in an overly simplistic description) just applying colors to existing boxes.

To get involved, Designers need a clear place to find projects to help on, and a clear way to help on projects -- as designers aren't about to open source code, install it on their own system and then begin work on the project.

I consider myself to pretty knowledgeable in the tech community and work as a full stack designer/developer, yet I have absolutely no clue where or how to get involved design-wise with any open source project. There's no "design" section on github or google code that I've ever seen :)