The biggest battle designers have when working with developers is getting across the idea that design is not "how something looks", but, "how something works".

This means that, ideally, the design process comes before the coding process.

It can be very dispiriting for a designer to come into a project somewhere in the middle to find that major design decisions have been made and cannot be overturned. It is common, for instance, to find open-source UI that mimics the data structures of the code rather than the foibles of a human brain.

If a designer were to join an open source project they would be seen as "trying to change everything", "dumbing down" and "trying to take over". Which would, in a way, be true - and probably exactly what was needed.

I've often wondered if we designers could start open-source projects: start designing, publish & document our designs, release our work to the open-source community and wait to see if anyone bites.

I have seen this happen before and it was amazingly successful: Coverflow. Andrew Coulter Enright, a designer and artist, published a design for "how iTunes should work" on his website. Jonathan del Strother, a Mac developer, bit and published an implementation. Cover Flow was purchased by Apple Inc. in 2006.

I'd love to see something similar happen with a larger open-source app. Any designers out there want to join me in starting a site for exactly this kind of workflow?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Coulter_Enright http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow