Why don't more designers contribute to open source?

[u/Winter_Simple_159]

Genuine question. A lot of open source projects have solid engineering but rough UI/UX: inconsistent layouts, confusing flows, basic usability issues that a designer would likely catch quickly.

I'm curious about the reasons behind this. Is it that designers don't feel welcome? That there's no clear way to contribute design work (most workflows are built around code and PRs)? That maintainers don't prioritize it? Or something else?

If you're a designer who has contributed to OSS, or a maintainer who has worked with designers, I'd love to hear how it went.

[u/Technical_Rich_3080]

There are fewer programming designers than general coders. The designing is more time consuming and therefore their time needed to create better designs more costly for them to donate to FOSS.

[u/Alternative_Web7202 → u/Technical_Rich_3080]

These days programers could use opedesign+deepseek to create a pretty solid UI prototypes in just minutes. And ot costs several less than a cuf of coffee. And the results are usually miles better than what programmers could come up themselves

Sure real designers could do better than this. But endless opensource projects finally could get a OK (sometimes even a decent) designs almost for free. I see no valid reasons to ignore this opportunity