So please give a round of applause to our speaker this morning, thank you So I hope you had a great party yesterday. It seems like a few people are still hangover, but

Of course, that's that's part of open source right, so I'm not a developer actually. I'm designer I also don't work for Mozilla, so if you think like Hey, I cannot do that that's not true every one of us can start contributing So I'm going to talk about how we do open design at Mozilla

I not only and also about a few of my experiences in other communities So a bit about me. I'm a speaker at Mozilla so Mozilla was so nice to bring me here and to speak about open design at Mozilla. I'm also representative in Albania

I'm not based here although. I can speak pretty okish German So if you have any question also feel free to say to me in German I'm the founder of Oura Design. It's a startup focused only on free open source design so projects which need help can kind of request it to us, and we have we work with Inkscape and GIMP and

Really help also a lot of open source project, which lack design and don't know where to go because agencies might have a different way of dealing with them and I'm a board member open left hackerspace It's one of the few hackerspaces in Albania and also I'm a community manager on site point

Site point is a web portal for web developers So there's this thing that in many open source communities People perceive the idea of open source that it's Only code right so if you do it open source you put your code in some repo

And it's like it's open in Magic way, right? but I believe that's not only the case open source is a much bigger movement and Especially with free software like I don't want to go into the debate about free software and open source so excuse me beforehand do that

But I believe that We need to offer also other contributors Not only programmers the chance to contribute to open source even if they don't have the technical knowledge so We thought the same in many other communities And I was trying to help a lot of communities to offer these paths for people like me who don't know how to go

There's this thing with designers and developers who They cannot communicate well with each other sometimes because they have different perspectives on things For designers priorities might be not the priorities developers have for example if you get a open source

program out there chances are the user experience might not be the best because designers weren't involved into that But I can totally understand why not because we are quite a bit arrogant at some times

We want our thing to get to get done the way we want it to be without Leaving so much feedback to the community and this is due to the fact that the free software and open source movement started like 30 years ago with the free software foundation and back then

Yeah, well designers weren't so interested into that right and Developers had a much bigger head start than us and so they could really learn from scratch how to deal with this issues Well designers well we got into the play a bit later like if the few years ago were

bigger companies like rat hat or SUSE We could nice that hey this we need to push much bigger efforts into that And I'm really happy to see that also other more grassroots projects put some importance into this So this is some background why?

We might not work together that that best there is a lot of space for improvement and There's this problem with us. We don't have much empathy We don't care so much about what other people think of our work we We are a bit arrogant as I said, but once this gets once we move this aspect of our character

We can work much closer together, and I really need to appreciate developers here because they are much used to work in the open designers aren't and I believe that's a key advantage you have as developers

but So the first things we need to change is a mind shift. It's not a using github or not It's not using that software not it's a mind shift in our mindset To have more empathy which I believe is a quite important thing in open source communities

so There's this difference as you can see in the comic here There is open source that there's design design might be a premium service it might be Tailored to something what the designer believes you need well open source is like hey

Let's go and see where we end up right so how do you combine these two things this? This was a big question of mine When I joined like four years ago The community the open source communities, and I was like okay now I have two hobbies. I like design. I like open source

Jack of all trades, I don't like that. I don't want to do everything in open source communities and So yeah, I thought why not combine this both, but I was like struggling quite for a long time how to do that So one of the first steps I took

To improve this was to to get out of this mindset that hey, this is my work please don't abuse it don't don't use it take permission and When I started to let go of this it felt really good because people started to appreciate it way more

They used your work. They didn't abuse it. I was like okay people are using this work quite nicely they didn't do any Bad stuff with that So I was like really surprised how well it worked worked out so I started to like adopt this mindset way more and

One of the concrete things you can do to to improve this is to use creative comms licenses. It's it's the equivalent of GPL licenses, but for creative works, so it really it really works great for us designers and

While we could be afraid that people would abuse this work Usually the opposite happens, so if you're a music fan for example. There's this band called Nine Inch Nails might over it and Two of their albums were released under creative comms licenses. No commercial. You could download it for free to listen and

Like people were like wondering okay? How why do they do that right? They don't get any money off of this Just release it for free, but Nine Inch Nails Afterwards analyzed the downloads Statistics and analyzes where they was downloaded from and later on they toured in this place is where the most downloads came from

And it was hugely successful although their albums were free on our creative comms licenses So this really challenges the classic way of doing creative work or even business commercially commercial wise

so before we start bashing like Open licenses they don't do money. They don't make money. We can't live with that We need to think of alternative ways how we can deal with that today so over a year ago I

stumbled upon some fellow guys at a conference like this in Berlin and They were doing design and they were like having this group open source design I Was like so surprised because I never heard of that I was like involved for almost three years and like no one told me about this hey this exists right and

These guys were doing great stuff their website was completely on GitHub Their design were open they open source projects could request design from them, and they would do it and This was like really the vision I had but I didn't have the guts

To make this happen because I was thinking okay. I'm alone Why should I I cannot do this alone so once I saw that there are people who are thinking in a similar manner than I do I got really motivated, and I started like contributing and I started like talking to these guys and

Well, I became part of open source design as well So this is from the past experience know a bit more about Mozilla These are 25 logos Not done by the whole community there are more by the whole community these are 25 logos done by me in the past three years for different Mozilla projects and

Well many people might expect that okay an Employee can do that. I'm not an employee. I'm a normal contributor. Just like every one of us here so I really got got the chance to work closer with a

Huge project like Mozilla and because the creative team Who was doing for the corporation foundation stuff? They didn't have the the time to do all of this We needed more volunteers and like people appreciated that and I took some time off to do all of this stuff And it really was worth it and the experience was great for example. I was I was like I was doing a logo for

India An Indian community, it's like it's so far away. You would never get the chance to do that so There are some important lessons here, which I'm going to talk to through right now and how?

We do design at Mozilla So I'm going to stop here for a second if you have a question, please interrupt me Otherwise we can also discuss Later on so we started open design at Mozilla

There was a huge need for design and like people requested me personally hey, can you do that? Hey, can you do this place? It was fun because I could like put a lot of stuff in my resume I worked for Mozilla on this and that blah blah blah, but it's not the right thing in a community, right? so I pushed to create a group at Mozilla where volunteers could gather and

They could talk with staff and like to design work and contribute just like you contribute a patch to Firefox we would make design more efficient and Employees and volunteers or contributors could work together on stuff

So we do not have only them separately, but a lot of projects would be a collaborative effort between both sides So we had a we wanted to have a central place Where everyone could request so it would not be on back channels back and forth on emails or similar

And the one of the biggest important things I believe we we wanted to do was having designers work with employees work with contributors So it wouldn't be it wouldn't mean that their contribution was really important. It was not just okay Hey play with this and leave us alone. This was a really important aspect to

Get all contributors into into this And well last but not least we want to question be trackable everything transparent We would see what someone would request if that would make sense if we should work on that or not

So the tools we use was a github repo It's not a free software open source tool. I guess but the stuff all hosted on there is free and open source It worked really well for us Some people would have needed to learn how to

Create issues pull requests and stuff, but it was not a big issue. We would like mostly discuss on issues on github issues. I mean We also had the Mozilla discourse. It's a forum. It's a web-based forum where people could discuss and one of the most important aspects was having a monthly call you would

Gather at a conference video conference call and like there would be like five to twenty people talking about design at Mozilla and This was really great because I we could like talk face to face. Okay virtually of course with Big minds behind Firefox logo for example or other designers, and this was really motivating for a lot of people including me

So if you know either path This was the either pet of the first meeting where everyone was signing their name It's really diverse so many colors so many people and it was like okay, wow I didn't expect this to be that big

So a lot of people join a lot of people wanted to help with that a lot of people had an opinion on that So it really felt great to get this going finally, so this is our github If you want to check it out, it's Mozilla slash open design our issues are over there people can request

different design requests logos Banners similar, and we would discuss on that whether that makes sense to do or not sometimes people request logos for everything it and We want to discuss that first. Do you really need a logo?

Because right now at Mozilla. We have like 200 logos Doesn't make sense really to have a logo for every single little project Because like people would see that logo instead of Mozilla, so that's what's what's was bothering us later on that's that was a small problem and

especially in many countries people don't get the relation between Mozilla and Firefox and People really don't know that Mozilla does other stuff apart Firefox So we wanted to show people hey, we do also other things than Firefox Anyway, I'm going to show you two examples here the first example is a small request from India

there was this there was this community who wanted to do their Indian meetup and They needed a sticker for that so they could give it out to all the participants put on laptops and similar So the brief was pretty straightforward

The style information and the deadline the deadline was very reasonable over three four weeks time So yeah, we started doing it And then there was one designer who like came up with a concept for this this is a building in India in the city

Where the Mira would hold place? I'm sorry. I'm not very geographically accurate But he started with this concept and we like Ping-pong some feedback over this so he worked together with me and some other people and the final result was This so this was a sticker which we created for this

This is one of the smaller requests. It's not a huge request But it was a very cool. It was a very efficient effort, which we just finished in like two three days and Yeah, well the Indians have a sticker now for their meetup, so this is really great

Well, there is also something bigger than this which was not as easy as you can see this was a quite easy request But one of the bigger and I think the biggest challenge we had and will probably have in the next years Well we are doing a redesign so in a few months you will not see the Mozilla logo as it was

We have a problem with our logo right now Which some people might not recognize? but We don't have a icon we have only the M Which we got sued by Mars almost sued by Mars at one point because M&Ms

It was like very similar to M&M anyway. That's a long story, so we wanted to create a new brand identity and like really Express what Mozilla is to people? So we launched our block Mozilla open design and

We Mozilla hired an agency Johnson banks to do the design working with a creative team working with a community, so it was really really interesting because An agency was doing that But the community would like give feedback and comment and like get involved in all the decisions

so this was one of the few use cases where open source design would be applied to a such a big organization than Mozilla Yeah Something as I said what's wrong with it now is that we don't have an icon like the biggest brands

Can be recognized by a small little fav icon icon whatever in very small spaces Yet, we didn't have that oh someone wrote to me That shouldn't happen anyway so We wanted to do that

two months ago in London we had the Mozilla all hands where over two thousand one thousand three hundred people modillions would meet up and We did this gallery the open design gallery where people could come see the concepts of

our rebranding and comment what they like about So for example there were concepts about the fight that Mozilla needs to fight for doing that what we do Some people supported that some people not they would like put post-its on it with comments some other were like doing the good, so we

So Mozilla was for them some someone who was doing good for for the internet and like five other concepts people people would express like Physically, I would like post Post-it on the wall, and they would say what they liked about it and whatnot so

This was like over crossing borders not only virtually, but also physically there were there were over 200 people there Commenting and it felt really great You see all these people see your work So these are some of the early concepts. I know it's scary

To to see that Mozilla can be different than what you're used to But this is not final These are seven concepts Which people will comment on which you can really comment on on the block after after this feel free to?

to go to the website and comment and We are going to choose what direction we will take this will take quite some time We will get out of this sound concepts. We'll get three concepts in September and we'll have the final result in December so People like you and all other contributors

Will shape all of this So you can you are free to get involved even though if you're not a designer also a developer We always need help from programmers to code

some image generators for example or other stuff and If you have an opinion which I believe all of you do on the logo designs concepts You can feel free to go to our block open design and Just comment on your favorite or least favorite design

with what you have to say about that and all of your comments will be taken into account and We'll shape the Mozilla brand according to what the community wants, so yeah Design can be open source as well. It's not only about code It's also about other non technical

Contribution paths as design So next time you are doing an open source project I hope you take this into account and think that not only the code needs to be open, but maybe also other aspects Thank you very much, and I hope that you enjoyed it and please if you have any questions

Are there so thank you very much Are there any questions at this point so what what I'd like to ask is How many people are

How many people are actually involved in in the process you just described? Yes from the community side there are like 10 active designers and maybe a few more designers who get who become active from time to time and

Well, there is the ABC Which is doing the work? so and the creative team and If you count all the people who are commenting on How they like the brand or what feedback they have on it could be easily a thousand but

Yeah, it depends on which scope you mean, but they're like hardly working actively working on that like 20 30 people okay, and You are completely globally distributed a complete Distributed team or are there are some Do you make some some meetups or some?

Conferences for this specific topic as well So in London we have the old hands where? All Brazilians would meet up in a single place that what that's one of the events where all of us meet but a part of that everything is happening digitally and

Yeah, we are distributed. We have like designers from the US Latin America Europe India Malaysia also Indonesia Yeah Okay, I understand You gave you our contact details

What would you recommend as a first step if you want to contribute to your to your project yes is it a good idea to Contact someone Why email is it good to reach out?

On some other means what is your recommendation? I? personally prefer when people like just start to ask a question on github because these things would not get to me personally and This would I would not be a deal breaker with this because I'm not the community the community is the community so

It would be the best way to reach out is to open an issue on github and Comment what you want if you don't feel comfortable with that feel free to also to reach personally of course Okay question How do you evaluate feedback I mean from my personal experience or

When you deal with something like design where it's basically or often a matter of personal taste Everyone can have an opinion, and it's tricky when you have like very vocal minority like Working something down or working something specific up. Do you just read through the comments, or do you put it into some statistical?

I don't know data So that's a very interesting question actually and it's very blurry for example in general we would evaluate if this comments actually had a Reason behind it because if you say okay, I don't like that because it sucks

Well Sorry, that's not helpful right if you say like we have comments like this on the first logo Okay, that looks like the eye of Sauron Okay, that makes sense okay I I get that why you get that feeling and we take this into account or like we had some

Some comments about that I feel like this feels too big brother to me like being watched instead of watching the watchers like So these are comes which are very constructive which? which are helpful and Saying like this is too colorful. This is too simple. This is too complex doesn't really help

So also design is not It's Not hundred percent a matter of taste there are a few things which are Which are psychological which are scientific and when people are starting to?

To reason with this kind of arguments we can start a discussion and it usually ends up really really productive So yeah, that's how we deal with it any other question anything else In this case. Thank you very much again. Thank you very much