[zeroq]

> contributors of free software tend to be power users

or, simply put, nerds

it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface

if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.

[WD-42]

My guess is that, as has always been, the pool of people willing to code for free on their own time because it's fun is just much larger than the people willing to make icons for software projects on their own time because they think it's fun.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Graphic designers and artists get ripped off, all the time; frequently, by nerds, who tend to do so, in a manner that insults the value of the artist's work.

It's difficult to get those kinds of creatives to donate their time (trust me on this, I'm always trying).

I'm an ex-artist, and I'm a nerd. I can definitively say that creating good designs, is at least as difficult as creating good software, but seldom makes the kind of margin that you can, from software, so misappropriation hurts artists a lot more than programmers.

[some_furry]

This is a weird thread for me to read, as someone who a) works primarily with developer tooling (and not even GUI tooling, I write cryptography stuff usually!), b) is very active in a vibrant community of artists that care about nerd software projects.

I don't, as a rule, ever ask artists to contribute for free, but I still occasionally get gifted art from kind folks. (I'm more than happy to commission them for one-off work.)

Artists tragically undercharge for their labor, so I don't think the goal should be "coax them into contributing for $0" so much as "coax them into becoming an available and reliable talent pool for your community at an agreeable rate". If they're enthusiastic enough, some might do free work from time to time, but that shouldn't be the expectation.

[galagawinkle489]

Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently.

If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.

It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.

Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.

[Dylan16807]

> Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.

Are you quoting someone? Yeah it's a real job, and so is programming. I don't think anyone in this conversation is being dismissive about either job.

[aleph_minus_one]

> It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.

> Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.

A lot of developers also tend to invest quite an insane amount of work into their preferred open-source project and they do know how complicated their work is, and also how insane the value is that they provide for free.

So, where is the difference?

[prepend]

Programming is a big deal too.

It’s not like graphic design is harder than programming.

I’d rather have crappy graphics than pay designers instead of programmers for free oss.

[nemomarx]

It's just more common for artists to do small commission work on the side of a real job. 30 dollars for something is basically a donation or tip in my view, and the community can crowd fund for it the same way bug bounties work I think?

[some_furry]

> Yet artists expect to be treated differently.

Because it's a different job!

Your post is like asking, "Why is breathing free but food costs money?"

[Dylan16807]

Either you're implying that people should code for free, or your analogy is so vague as to be useless.

Yeah it's a different job but they're both jobs. Why should one be free and one not be free?

[cwillu]

You know that (some) people get paid to work on free software, right?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It’s a long story, in my case.

There’s a very good reason for me to be asking for gratis work. I regularly do tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of work for free.

[imtringued]

That only works if you form a team with the artist. It doesn't work when the person you're commissioning free stuff from is an external artist who is getting flooded by both paid and unpaid requests. Even a token amount will let them know to prioritize you over the freeloaders.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

This is true. I have paid friends free market rates for work; even though they would have done it for free.

It’s a matter of Respect. It’s really amazing, how treating folks with simple Respect can change everything.

I like working in teams, but I also participate in an organization, where we’re all expected to roll up our sleeves, and pitch in; often in an ad hoc fashion.

[renewiltord]

Most fields just don’t have the same culture of collaborative everyone-wins that software does. Artists don’t produce CC art in anywhere close to the same influence as engineers produce software. This is probably due to some kind of compounding effect available in software that isn’t available in graphics.

Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists doing the same at the same scale. Or architects, or structural engineers. Maybe the closest are some boat designs but even those are accidental.

It might just be that we were lucky to have some Stallmans in this field early.

[pfannkuchen]

Isn’t there a lot more compensation available in software? Like as a developer, you can make a lot of money without having to even value money highly. I think in other fields you don’t generally get compensated well unless you are gunning/grinding for it specifically. “For the love of the art” people in visual arts are painters or something like that, probably. Whereas with software you can end up with people who don’t value money that much and have enough already, at least to take a break from paid work or to not devote as much effort to their paid work. I imagine a lot of open source people are in that position?

[prepend]

I think most OSS projects are started by unemployed people as hobbies. Or ego projects to get jobs.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I'm unemployed (retired), and it's a hobby (that I take quite seriously).

Ego is likely involved. I love my babies, but what others think of my work isn't that important (which is good, because others aren't very impressed).

I make tools that I use, mostly.

[renewiltord]

Well, early '90s Torvalds wasn't the wealthy fellow he is now and he was busy churning things out and then relicensed Linux under GPL.

[bitwize]

Fonts are an interesting case. The field of typography is kind of migrating from the "fuck you, pay me" ethic of the pure design space into a more software-like "everyone wins" state, with plenty of high-quality open-source fonts available, whereas previously we had to make do with bitmap-font droppings from proprietary operating systems, Bitstream Vera, and illegal-to-redistribute copies of Microsoft's web font pack.

I think this is because there are plenty of software nerds with an interest in typography who want to see more free fonts available.

[WD-42]

I think the collaborative nature of open source software dev is unlike anything else. I can upload some software in hopes that others find is useful and can build on top of it, or send back improvements.

Not sure how that happens with a painting, even a digital one.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Art tends to be a solitary vocation.

But professional graphic designers, train to work in product-focused teams. They also are able to create collaborative suites of deliverables.

Most developers will find utility in the work of graphic designers, as opposed to fine artists.

[kmeisthax]

There's actually a fair bit of highly influential CC-licensed artwork out there. Wikipedia made a whole free encyclopedia. The SCP Foundation wiki is it's own subculture. There's loads of Free Culture photography on Wikimedia Commons (itself mirrored from Flickr). A good chunk of your YouTube feed is probably using Kevin McCleod music - and probably fucking up the attribution strings, too. A lot of artists don't really understand copyright.

But more importantly, most of them don't really care beyond "oh copyright's the thing that lets me sue big company man[0]".

The real impediment to CC-licensed creative works is that creativity resists standardization. The reason why we have https://xkcd.com/2347/ is because software wants to be standardized; it's not really a creative work no matter what CONTU says. You can have an OS kernel project's development funded entirely off the back of people who need "this thing but a little different". You can't do the same for creativity, because the vast majority of creative works are one-and-done. You make it, you sell it, and it's done. Maybe you make sequels, or prequels, or spinoffs, but all of those are going to be entirely new stories maybe using some of the same characters or settings.

[0] Which itself is legally ignorant because the cost of maintaining a lawsuit against a legal behemoth is huge even if you're entirely in the right

[renewiltord]

I like this explanation, though there is one form of creative standardization: brand identity. And I suppose that's where graphics folk engage with software (Plasma, the GNOME design, etc.). Amusingly, I like contributing to Wikipedia and the Commons so I should have thought of that. You're absolutely right that I had a blind spot there in terms of what's the equivalent there of free software.

Another thing is that the vast amount of fan fiction out there has a hub-and-spoke model forming an S_n graph around the solitary 'original work' and there are community norms around not 'appropriating' characters and so on, but you're right that community works like the SCP Foundation definitely show that software-like property of remixing of open work.

Anyway, all to say I liked your comment very much but couldn't reply because you seem to have been accidentally hellbanned some short while ago. All of your comments are pretty good, so I reached out to the HN guys and they fixed it up (and confirmed it was a false positive). If you haven't seen people engage with what you're saying, it was a technical issue not a quality issue, so I hope you'll keep posting because this is stuff I like reading on HN. And if you have a blog with an RSS feed or something, it would be cool to see it on your profile.

[kmeisthax]

> Anyway, all to say I liked your comment very much but couldn't reply because you seem to have been accidentally hellbanned some short while ago.

OH MY FUCKING GOD THANK YOU. As far as I remember, I got 'disappeared' off HN right after some major upgrade in August, but it never got fixed, so I just assumed someone at YC was pissed off about something I said about (insert authoritarian dictator here).

[oddmiral]

Users are trying to solve their own problems.

Graphic artists are creating graphics editors (Gimp, Krita, Blender, ComfyUI, etc.) with tons of options.

[palata]

Just for the record: as a developer, I have done a ton of free software contributions. I pretty much didn't get anything from it, except people complaining or asking me to do even more for them, for free.

I don't know if that qualifies as "getting ripped off", but it's not exactly paying me either.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I can relate, but artists get treated even worse. It seems to be a thing with creatives. Musicians also get ripped off a lot, as do writers.

Developers seem to have a product that people can actually attach a value to, but art and music; not so much. They seem to be in different Venn circles.

In all of it, we do stuff because of the love of the craft. One of the deeper satisfactions, for me, is when folks appreciate my work (payment is almost irrelevant; except for "keeping score"). It's pretty infuriating, to have someone treat my work as if it is a cheap commodity. There's a famous Star Trek scene, where Scotty and his crew are being disciplined for a bar fight with some Klingons[0], and Scotty throws the first punch. I can relate.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rsZfcz3h1s

[pseudalopex]

> Developers seem to have a product that people can actually attach a value to, but art and music; not so much.

This says more of your perception I think. Many people attach value to art and music. Many people do not attach value to software.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That's possible, but remember that I used to be an artist[0]. I have sold a number of works, and I'm familiar with attaching value to art.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

[zer00eyz]

UI != icons.

UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...

This is how we get UI's that work but suck to use. This is how we allow dark patterns to flourish. You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if it makes a dent in the bottom of the eye and you dont have to face their criticisms directly.

[lamontcg]

> UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...

Which is also why UI/UX on open source projects are generally going to suck.

There's certainly no money to pay for that kind of experiment.

And if you include telemetry, people lose their goddamn minds, assuming the open source author isn't morally against it to begin with.

The result is you're just getting the author's intuitive guesswork about UI/UX design, by someone who is likely more of a coder than a design person.

[cwillu]

The dependency on telemetry instead of actually sitting down with a user and watching them use your software is part of the problem. No amount of screen captures, heatmaps or abandoned workflow metrics will show you the expression on a person's face.

[imtringued]

You actually skipped over the most important part:

> You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if ... you dont have to face their criticisms directly.

A lot of software developers can't take criticism well when it comes to their pet projects. The entire FreeCAD community, for instance, is based entirely around the idea that FreeCAD is fine and the people criticising it are wrong and have an axe to grind, when that is exactly backwards.

[Dylan16807]

Unless you get super invasive, telemetry will tell you how often a feature is used but I don't think it'll help much with bad and confusing layouts.

[ambicapter]

Much larger but not non-existent, people post their work (including laborious stuff like icon suites and themes) on art forums and websites for no gain all the time.

[keyringlight]

Going back to the winxp days there was a fairly vibrant group of people making unofficial themes for it, although I think that was helped by the existence of tools (from Stardock?) specialized on that task and making it approachable if your skill set didn't align perfectly.

[oddmiral]

Earlier free software has/had tons of free artwork: icons, themes, skins, mods. I had few dozens window border skins and GUI themes for Gnome 1.x, for example. gnome-look.org has 1.5k themes for GTk3/4, but I'm OK with stock theme now, because 90% of the time I see browser or console.

[array_key_first]

They're not just nerds, they're power users. These are different things.

Pretty much everyone is a power user of SOME software. That might be Excel, that might be their payroll processor, that might be their employee data platform. Because you have to be if you work a normal desk job.

If Excel was simpler and had an intuitive UI, it would be worthless. Because simple UI works for the first 100 hours, maybe. Then it's actively an obstacle because you need to do eccentric shit as fast as possible and you can't.

Then, that's where the keyboard shortcuts and 100 buttons shoved on a page somewhere come in. That's where the lack of whitespace comes in. Those aren't downsides anymore.

[csin]

"If Excel was simpler and had an intuitive UI, it would be worthless."

Excel is a simple intuitive UI.

I use 10% of Excel. I don't even know the 90% of what it's capable of.

It hides away it's complexity.

For people that need the complex stuff, they can access it via menus/formulas.

For the rest of us, we don't even know it's there.

Whereas, Handbrake shoves all the complexity in your face. It's overwhelming for first time users.

[array_key_first]

> For people that need the complex stuff, they can access it via menus/formulas.

Yes, this is an obstacle. This makes your software worse for power users. Because now they have to jump through hoops.

If they just took all those options and dumped them somewhere, that would be better.

Okay, another example: a datagrid or table. In naive apps targeting consumers, they're filled with whitespace and they're simple to look at. Great, right?

Oh... you need to see more information than the absolute bare bones? It's okay, you can click 'show more'. The problem is that, now, it takes too much time.

What if I want to see 50 results at the same time? Gulp. If I have to click show more 10 times to do that, I'm taking my computer and throwing it out the window. I don't give a rats ass about your whitespace or visual hierarchy. I want the software to do the thing for me so I can move on with my life.

This is why people will SWEAR by old software. There are many people who refuse to use modern versions of Excel. Because it's too annoying to use, and they use it all day long, so that's not acceptable.

[Panzer04]

The person who is going to bother adding stuff to a piece of software is almost certainly by definition a power-user.

This means they want to add features they couldn't get anywhere else, and already know how to use the existing UI. Onboarding new users is just not their problem or something they care about - They are interested in their own utility, because they aren't getting paid to care about someone else's.

It's not a "nerd" thing.

[8note]

UX and interface designers are also nerds.

i think the bigger issue is that the power users usecases are different from the non-power users. not a skillset problem, but an incentive one

[phendrenad2]

I'm optimistic that the rise of vibe coding will allow the people who understand the user's wants and needs to fix the world's FOSS UIs.

[moring]

I'm sceptical about fixing (in the sense of a lasting solution), but it might be a very powerful tool to communicate to devs what the UI should look like.

[DrewADesign]

I have been beating this drum for many years. There are some big cultural rifts and workflow difficulties. Unless FOSS products are run by project managers rather than either developers or designers, it’s a tough nut. Last I looked, gimp has been really tackling this effort more aggressively than most.

[graemep]

I am not convinced bad UI is either a FOSS issue, or solved by having project managers. I know very non-tech people who struggle with Windows 11, for example. I do not like MS Office on the rare occasions I have used it on other people's machines. Not that impressed by the way most browser UIs are going either.

[DrewADesign]

Microsoft has been lagging on interface design for a long time. If the project managers are focused on forcing users into monetizable paths against their will, then of course you’re going to get crap interfaces and crap software quality. If you have a project manager that’s focused on directing people to solve problems for users rather than people just bolting on whatever makes sense, then that’s a lot different. And no, bad UIs aren’t inherent to FOSS— look at Firefox, Blender, Signal… all FOSS projects that are managed by people focused on integrating the most important features in a way that makes sense for the ecosystem.

[Cotterzz]

gimp has been my goto when I want to explain bad ui, developer designed ui, or just typical foss ui I'm glad they're fixing it. It's also my image editor of choice.

[DrewADesign]

Yeah I’ve been using it as a go-to example for the wrongest approach to UI design for years. I’m glad to see they’re working harder than most to fix some of the underlying problems.