I've seen "better designed" open source pages, but they tend to send the wrong message. When you see a mostly-well-designed open source page, your brain just feels like you're being tricked. You feel like someone's trying to charge you for something, or it just feels wrong.

Design is contextual, and what we think of as "well-designed" tends to be from a SaaS perspective, and that sends the wrong message. You see it and think "oh, this is a SaaS product," and your brain just feels weird.

This is true for all design. In markets, generic brands use a worse design to signal they're "cheaper," cereals for kids use cartoons, etc. The vibe needs to match the product, or else your brain sets off alarm bells.

Open Source projects use design to project what they value. Org mode for Emacs should feel like... a site for emacs. Simple, clear, no frills. Whereas a site like Prettier looks nicer, because that's the whole point.

(Also, separate "design" from "usability"... this site isn't pretty, but I can find everything I need super easily!)

Simple answer might be open source contributors don’t respect the work designers do as much as other environments and as a result don’t create communities that attract them.

Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that skilled professionals don't work on someone else's hobbies for free?

No, because the premise is open source projects which developers, skilled professionals, work on.

My real hypothesis, by the way, is that designers have been trained from early on not to do free work. The “work for exposure” meme captures this pathos.

Case in point: my default reaction to see SaaS-style "pretty" page is to close the tab. I have my reasons to avoid SaaS as much as possible, so if my brain pattern-matches your site to a "generic SaaS" design, I almost immediately lose interest.

Am I a minority? Maybe. But then, I'm also org mode's target audience.

Think about Lowes vs West Elm. Both sell things for homeowners. But you can tell from their aesthetics what to expect. Lowes could copy the aesthetic of an Apple store, but it would feel very “off”.

Have you seen emacs? It ain’t pretty. But it’s effective and works for a certain type of person. This aesthetic fits the emacs aesthetic. If this site was too polished and pretty, people would expect a polished and pretty product.

It indicates it won’t be easy to use this product, and it works to attract the correct user. If it was beautiful, people would have different expectations for the tool. This design indicates it’ll require work to set up and understand.

In the same way this site would never work for a nice macOS app, a Panic site wouldn’t work for this tool.

Not all of us view the last decade of web "design" as an improvement. There's a lot of poorly-functioning crap on websites in 2020 that frankly doesn't even look pretty.

Of course you can make it really special, but I assume anything that requires extra developer hours will be prioritized against other requirements.

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That being said, this '4 decades dated to 1 decade dated' is not an useful way to criticize a design. Great design is atemporal.

You could try to mention specific things do you don't like about it. Or at the very least, emotions it causes in you.

Not sure why I was downvoted but this was my question, though I should've framed it nicer. I'm curious why there aren't more designers (even understudies) contributing to OSS, even to build their portfolio, in a similar way SWEs do.

> That being said, this '4 decades dated to 1 decade dated' is not an useful way to criticize a design. Great design is atemporal.

I'm no designer but this seems absurd to me. Judging designs temporally seems to be commonplace. The new site feels like a period of design ruled by Bootstrap which new designs are using less than ever.

I also agree it's not in good taste to be critiquing of open source and reduced funding projects but I'm curious about the talent-attraction mechanics. We should be able to talk about that.

With that said, kudos to them for getting it out! Heres to hoping more designers dive into OSS :)

The workflow to build that site is completely different from what most web designers are accustomed.

I do freelance writing and I blog and I've been repeatedly told "Get a real job. Quit expecting writing to pay. It doesn't."

I briefly was interested in trying to contribute to open source as a non programmer. I've seen other non programmers ask about contributing to open source.

It's a really unwelcoming environment for non programmers. Even people who are programmers and wanting to get into open source talk about how difficult it can be to get involved. Now dial that up a few notches for people who don't program, think differently, communicate differently and are frequently looked down upon by programmers because programmers make good money and many of them are openly contemptuous of people who don't make good money and are often openly contemptuous of the kind of work they do, as if what they do takes less smarts, isn't as valuable, etc.

I think OSS projects are a bit like Companies --- each one has its own culture, and attracts different sorts of people.

If you're interested in getting involved, please don't hesitate to introduce yourself on the mailing list :)

You have a typo. First line under Headlines:

Lines that start with and asterisk

Should be an asterisk.

Someone else has suggested you are failing to adequately convey the rich possibilities for people in the know looking for advanced tools:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24905276

From my perspective, you also do a poor job of communicating with newcomers. It is not readily clear what this is and why they should be interested and the language is intimidating for an outsider/non-programmer.

If it were my website, I would remove the descriptors under your big links for Features, Install, Quickstart and Contribute. They add no real value and are just visual clutter, which is a problem when delivering information-dense content. In fact, I would remove the giant unicorn head in the very valuable above-the-fold section to make space for those four links, minus the extraneous descriptors. (Edit: By descriptors, I mean the part where you say extra stuff like "Yes. Do this." I don't mean the four one-word labels listed above.)

I would also remove "via" and "or" from your section indicating how people can provide financial support. I would either say "Support:" or "We take" or have no extra words and just post the three payment links.

Random thoughts from someone who knows absolutely nothing about this and has never before looked at your website, so take it with a grain of salt:

I wonder why you don't have a link to the Reddit sub r/orgmode.

In order to be more approachable for newbs without losing any vital info, I would reverse some of the initial info, something like this:

Keep notes, maintain to-do lists, plan projects, author documents, create computational notebooks, write literate programming and do so much more. All in a fast and effective plain text system.

An open-source extensible major mode for Emacs offering convenient plain text markup and more.

Also, if there is already some collection somewhere online of stories about people who have used this, I would link to it somewhere in this sentence:

Nearly every Org user has a story to tell about how Org enables and empowers them

If you wish to use any of the above, please feel free. If you wish to credit me to some degree for some of it, my name is Doreen Traylor and doreentraylor.com redirects to a site that is the closest thing to a business card that I have.

“Contempt” feels more like a consequence than a cause to me.

Below is something of an explanation as to why I don't think I deserve contempt. It is not a rant, though I imagine it will be interpreted as such by some people. I'm always damned if I do and damned if I don't here.

I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN (under a different handle). It's 100 names but it isn't a stable list, so there have been more than 100 people on it over the years. (Edit to add context: HN currently gets around 5 million unique visitors each month.)

If my data is accurate -- and I believe it is -- that means less than one percent of those names is an openly female member and I'm it. That puts me in a "league of my own."

For comparison purposes: I believe six percent of CEOs in the US are female and 17 percent of senior personnel (in the "C suite") are female. Yet I am routinely told it is somehow my fault I don't fit in here, my fault I am treated so badly, my fault I am poor, sexism/classism/etc are not a factor in my intractable poverty, etc. ad nauseum.

Just to be crystal clear: I am not talking trash about HN. I spend so much time here because this forum is so much better than other forums.

The problem is not HN. The problem is far larger than HN and this means you can't escape it anywhere, not even on HN which is generally a bastion of virtue in my eyes.

And before someone leaps up with the oh-so-tired accusation that I am obsessed with meaningless, worthless internet points and having a lot of karma here means nothing: It used to be pretty common on HN for men to say to other men here "You must be smart and competent because you have so much karma on HN!" That seems to have died down a good bit since I began pointing out that men do that here to other men and then do nothing but malign me any time I talk about how much karma I have to try to support some point or other I am trying to make.

In some sense, I don't care about karma points here. I use it as an easily referenced proxy for other things that are even harder to talk about in other ways.

Upvotes suggest I am deemed to be someone who "adds value" here. Yet no amount of adding value here comes back to me as significant professional respect, traction and -- critically -- income. Meanwhile, some of the men on the leader board are self-made millionaires and, in at least some cases, they got wealthy in part due to using HN to network and make professional contacts, something I very much wanted to use HN for but it has mostly been a bust for me.

I also don't care to see someone jump up and volunteer that they, also, have not managed to use HN to network or make money so "obviously" it's not my gender (or some other trait of mine). "Stuff just happens."

Yeah, I've heard it all before. It really doesn't hold water.

Not everyone uses HN that way, but some people do so successfully. It has actively been a goal of mine and I seem to make nearly zero headway on such goals.

I've come to associate the borderline absurdity of logos for open source projects with projects I like at this point, and I do think these kinds of logos are almost a shibboleth for certain kinds of software. I'd say it's less about not knowing how to do "better" or driving away designers and more about signaling "hey, this is NOT corporate software." I've always considered it as a community thing and a cultural quirk more than anything else. To come in and say "this unicorn is ugly, let me fix that for you" would be to misunderstand a lot of things about the context that the software exists in IMO.

I can't think of a more challenging "client" to take on than a decentralized group of engineers. Classic ways to build your design portfolio usually centre around small businesses, community groups, events and non-profits because they have clear needs that are easily served by design.

Another place where designers play is with open source/license fonts, icons, design systems etc. which makes sense because they are designing things for their peers.