Open design

I’ve said it a few times: Working in the open is fantastic. You open yourself to diverse ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Sadly, other ecosystems don’t enjoy the foundational tools that we developers have access to, like GitHub or GitLab, which early on put the focus on making coding a social activity.

Ideas like code reviews through pull requests, which have a sophisticated diffing interface, or LICENSE.md, which makes it possible to bind contributions to a specific license, are rare in design. Figma and Pentpot are trying to lay out the pieces, but we still have some way to go. Imagine if designers built curricula through open design projects, which would be the counterpart to open source but in design. They could review each other’s work before merging it into a “branch” (or the equivalent of that concept in design) and be able to license their work under a specific license.

We were eager to explore this idea in Tuist, so we joined some communities, and we were lucky to find Asmit Malakannawar, who immediately connected with us, the ideas behind Tuist, and our vision for a fully open platform to extend the capabilities of native tools. Like us, Asmit turned out to be a huge advocate for open source. He is involved in the GNOME community, where he made significant contributions in the past. Marek and I could not believe we crossed paths with him, but this is the beauty of open source. You cross paths with very talented people who place a strong focus on the people and the craft, and they can impact the software in very distinct ways.

It’s been a few weeks since he’s taken on some ownership from us, exploring ideas that have been in our backlog for some time, and taking the lead design role in the Tuist project. As part of that work, we’ll explore the idea of open design, make designs open under a permissive license so that anyone can use them, including developers who will be able to extend the platform in the future. We’ll also contribute design-related pieces of technology to the Elixir ecosystem, which is a language we’re passionate about. We want to inspire more designers to get involved in open source, and make our small contribution to making “open design” a reality.

I won’t cease to repeat this: Being open, and balancing that with building a thriving business that can support working in the open, is a unique strength in a space where people have become secondary in how we do business. We are placing people at the forefront of our business, and inviting a diversity of ideas to give existing native tools the superpowers necessary to use them at scale.

Welcome, Asmit, to the team!