Opening a design system to collaboration

Nuno explains the challenge of making a design system open-source and onboarding designers to contribute.

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Episode notes

Guest

Nuno Loureiro

Panelists

Eriol Fox | Victory Brown

Show Notes

In this episode of Sustain, host Eriol Fox and co-host Victory Brown are live with Nuno Loureiro, Lead Designer at the Ethereum Foundation, at Devconnect Conference in Buenos Aires. Nuno shares his journey in digital design and discusses his role in focusing on ethereum.org. He highlights the challenges of designing for open source platforms, including the difficulty of onboarding and collaborating with designers. He also touches on UX challenges in the context of blockchain technology, emphasizing the importance of trust and design for mass adoption of open source tools. The discussion further explores how the Ethereum Foundation engages with the community for design feedback and the decentralized nature of project narratives. The episode concludes with Nuno spotlighting Penpot, a tool he believes is changing the landscape design. Hit download now to hear more!

[00:00:34] Nuno shares his background in digital and product design and joining Ethereum Foundation to focus on Ethereum.org as a learning portal.

[00:02:13] He shares the biggest design challenges at the Ethereum Foundation starting out with a major challenge which was opening a design system to open source collaboration.

[00:04:08] Eriol asks how good design and usability relate to sustainable open source. Nuno argues UX is the main blocker for mass adoption of open source tools and uses tools like GIMP as an example.

[00:05:00] Victory asks how Nuno brings more designers into the ecosystem and elevates design conversations. He admits he’s “not doing enough” and notes how hard it is to balance paid work with open source contributions and critiques designers, including himself, as poor collaborators compared with developers.

[00:06:27] Eriol reflects on how both coders and designers get deeply attached to their work, and notes that vulnerability and openness to critique are hard but necessary for sustainability of open source to grow.

[00:07:54] Eriol brings up Vitalik’s talk, Founder of Ethereum, at Funding the Commons, where he emphasized reliability as critical to UX and poses a question to Nuno. He explains what Ethereum Foundation’s current “three mantras” are.

[00:11:49] A question is brought up about how design decisions for new features are made inside Ethereum and what others can learn. Nuno clarifies the Ethereum Foundation does not own the protocol or roadmap and is a community based approach.

[00:13:26] Victory asks how Ethereum gathers UX feedback from users. Nuno says they rely heavily on third party projects that do their own UX research.

[00:14:43] Nuno spotlights Penpot, an open source design tool he uses and believes is changing the design landscape.