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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is because there are plenty of software nerds with an interest in typography who want to see more free fonts available.
Not sure how that happens with a painting, even a digital one.
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
Graphic artists are creating graphics editors (Gimp, Krita, Blender, ComfyUI, etc.) with tons of options.
I don't know if that qualifies as "getting ripped off", but it's not exactly paying me either.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
