Debian Design Team
Infrastructure
Alioth Project: https://salsa.debian.org/design-team
Interacting with the team
Read about types of design first: Design
Email contact: design-devel@alioth-lists.debian.net (mailinglist)
Public IRC channel: #debian-design on irc.debian.org (OFTC, bridged from matrix)
Package tracker: https://tracker.debian.org/teams/design/
Scope
Debian Design team works on designability of Debian, and on welcoming designers into Debian.
Most concrete designs, and design processes for particular areas within Debian are handled by other more specific teams - e.g. desktops, artwork, and website. See also Design.
Projects
Debian Design Team develops a Debian Pure Blend for designers: DesignBlend.
Debian Design Team also maintains Debian packaging of the UX sketching tool Akira.
Debian Design: Team Vision Discussion @DebConf 2022, Prizren/Kosovo
Observed symptoms
- Debian is relatively ugly (when you compare it to other distros)
- core values based on freedom and universality; no focus not UX and aesthetics
- built primarily by engineers with stability in mind
- no focus on UX and aesthetics
- People with a core design background, strong hands-on design skills and a motivation to improve Debian struggle to find ways how to contribute. From their perspective, the Debian ecosystem (incl. community talks) seem complex, tech-heavy; the mechanics of how design related improvements/contributions can be made is hard to understand.
- Debian does not support workflows that some end-users might expect from a modern operating system (at least not "out-of-the box"), e.g. synching, viewing, streaming, editing files across Debian based devices (compared to iOS devices interplaying smoothly in the Apple ecosystem)
Vision
- Debian provides a stable overarching out-of-the-box UX
- Debian supports modern use-senarios and workflows adhering to free software principles
- Debian makes it easy for designers with a non-techy background to contribute and improve Debian's UX
Mission & Purpose
- Q: What does the Debian Design Team do? What is the purpose of existance of a Design Team within Debian, in particular given the existance of other teams that have been concerned with design related matters in relation to Debian, incl. Debian internal teams (Desktop Team, Font Team, etc) and external teams (DE design teams at Gnome, XFCE, etc)
A: the Debian Design Team is concerned with UX & design issues and opportunities that should be tackled within Debian on a distro-layer (and not other places / "isolated" upstream environments, such as DEs, WMs, individual packages)
Area of Concern & Opportunity
- enable non-techy people to improve and contribute to UX/design matters in Debian
- enable designers to get started
- provide a welcoming environment
- help them getting started and orient in the debian ecosystem
- get an overview of different types of design-related opportunities how they can contribute to debian
- graphic/visual/artwork
- themeing
- UI design
- interaction design
- user scenarios/process workflows (across packages)
- provide an overview of current design-related concerns, goals, priorities and projects within Debian
- overview of people and teams dealing with design related stuff
- overview of design-related projects
- map out an overview of system components, their inherent mechanics and development processes that are relevent to understand for design/UX contributions
- map out how to report a "design" bug
- enable designers to get started
- create a modern, easy-to-understand installation process
- compare to Elementary OS
- ensure visual consistency, branding and identity across desktop environments
- adhere to, promote and embody Debian values (i.e. freedom, stability, universality) in and through design
make sure different DE & WMs can be installed on Debian in parallel without breaking each other
- ensure that officially supported desktop environments adhere to standards to that they don't break things, e.g.
- avoid symptoms like double menues in Gnome, etc
- adhere to XDG
- make sure packages (e.g. libre-office) runs as intended on all installed/supported DEs
- notifications, menues, theming, etc
- what happens with packages that require Gnome, but Gnome is not installed?
create a modern out-of-the-box "look & feel" for all supported desktop environments
- how can the default configuration of DE's that are installed on Debian be made prettier?
- see delta between Cinnamon installed on Debian and native Cinnamon in MINT.
- pre-configuration/customisation of officially supported desktop environments (within their configuration space)
themeing / look & feel
- make it easy for designers to customise/configure an attractive out-of-the-box configuration of officially supported DEs (Cinnamon, XFCE, etc)
- see delta between Cinnamon installed on Debian and native Cinnamon in MINT.
- how can the default configuration of DE's that are installed on Debian be made prettier?
- useful out-of-the-box preconfiguration of supported packages
- behavioural/Interaction Design (.bashrc/CLI, etc)
- default installation, pre-configuration and interplay of packages towards enabling modern workflows
- add value to end-users through a smart composition and pre-configuration of packages (whereby the interplay of packages is larger than the sum of their individual parts), e.g.
- making modern end-user workflows function smoothly (cross-device support of workflows)
- reading on mobile, incl. storing/retrieving/editing notes
- syncing content for offline consumption/editing (notes,video,music)
- streaming content (to TV in bedroom)
integration with ?SolidBox (?)
- sensory data pooling (syncing GPS data, etc)
- backup (duplicity, rsync, etc)
- making modern end-user workflows function smoothly (cross-device support of workflows)
- add value to end-users through a smart composition and pre-configuration of packages (whereby the interplay of packages is larger than the sum of their individual parts), e.g.
Other Project Ideas
Create a Debian based blend targeting the Design Community (similar to DebianEdu targeting the education system)
Scope and Limitations
- Debian is a distribution, we do not modify any packages but ship them "as they are"
many (if not all) user touch points are mediated through DE & WMs, which are not really in Debian's domain/scope of concern
- design interventions should not create a burden in the debian ecosystems, i.e. on people/developers/teams etc.
- the Debian design team doesn't make other people's or existing team's work in the Debian ecosystem less important; we don't replace but complement and add value to their work