Traditionally, open source applications are written by developers. Often there’s no designer on the initial team and no time or resources to get designers involved.

In recent years, startups are more and more design minded. Especially for open source projects this means we need to advance our design sense to stay competitive and appeal to people.

In this talk I’ll describe the design process of ownCloud: How designers and developers work together, how we share knowledge and how we are building a design team.

(ownCloud is an open source project for data storage, sync and sharing. It also provides applications for management of calendars, contacts, notes and many more – most of it can be connected with GNOME Online Accounts already.)

Jan-Christoph Borchardt

Jan-Christoph Borchardt is an open source designer. Currently his focus is on ownCloud but he is involved with several other open source web projects. It is important for him to bring more design to open source and more open source to design.