Launched in 2000, Open Source Web Design OSWD goal was to provide the Open Source community with quality web designs to help get people’s projects on the web in a way that is both organized and good looking. From personal blogs to content managements systems to full fledged businesses, OSWD has been providing free web designs to those who need them for years.
After about five years, OSWD is serving about 1391 free design and I think it have relalized its main goal to let people share their designs and even if it was not offering good designs in the first years, it was giving lot of new ideas and thoughts to make day after day more robust designs. Today many designs are really nice and I saw their usage in different websites and this prove the change in quality of design served.
Open Source and Design
Open source was a choice and strategy for OSWD, people sharing their designs but without necessary a single copyright notice or License information. Generally people remote the original author and use it on their website, some of them keep it for reference and maybe this is one of the main reasons that made OSWD development slow and not lot of people contribute to this great community.
Design and Open Source
In the other side design have created in open source websites a new vision of modern website offering more and more interesting content. Let’s take the case of the GNU website even after years of development, the GNU website is still ugly inspite of all the content and effort that have been done for the community.
Some other websites of free projects have adopted open source design for their website. And the marriage between them was great.
OSWD Future
I think OSWD effort is really great in the latest five years, I remember its first design years ago and it was ugly. Today the website have a new look, the idea is more mature … It will be more interesting to add licences support to the website, so every author could decide about the Open Source licence to choose for his design. Also it would be interesting to add more sources and I’m talking about graphics, because until today designs are mainly based on CSS and it will be interesting to have more possibilities for web design such as images, animations … etc.
Why Open Source design is interesting
Open source design is not only offering ready to use solutions, but also ideas and techniques that we can learn from. There is something else which is the website that we saw everyday their sources are open also, so what’s the difference ? The difference is that designs of corporate websites are always copyrighted in addition to their logos … etc so you can see the source, but you cannot use them.
Open Source design is also interesting for new designers, they can share their designs to get feedbacks on them and improve their work and their knowledge in css, graphics, web design … etc.
Open Source for design
Open Source is a common term today for software, operating systems …etc. But when it came to design there is no specific licenses or orientation that have been done specially for designers. Certainly the design work is very different from programming because it have its artistic part but programming also have its an artistic part. We need today to make Open Source more artistic to better encourage design development, and what open source have made for software and operating systems could be done also for design.
