Episode 9: Andy Gonzalez and Contributing and Collaborating as a Designer

Sep 28, 2021

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Guest

Andy Gonzalez

Panelists

Memo Esparza | Eriol Fox | Perrie Ojemeh

Show Notes

Hello and welcome to Sustain Open Source Design! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source with design. Learn how we, as designers, interface with open source in a sustainable way, how we integrate into different communities, and how we as coders, work with other designers. Today, we have a really great guest with us, Andy Gonzalez, who works as UX Designer at Kaleidos Open Source and he collaborates with different design schools as a teacher and mentor. Kaleidos is a company that creates disruptive digital platforms, driven by a positive impact of technology on society, and is now focused on Penpot and Taiga, two open source platforms meant for digital product teams. Andy tells us all what drove Kaleidos to build an open source platform, and more about how Penpot and Taiga were created. We also find out what Andy sees in the future for collaboration, he explains four things that they consider contributions from a community member for Penpot, and if you’re interested in making contributions to Penpot, Andy explains where you can do that. Download this episode now to find out much more!

[00:01:45] Andy tells us about himself and he got involved in his career.

[00:04:02] Memo wonders how Andy got involved in open source stuff.

[00:07:14] Eriol asks Andy to talk about his experience with education, specifically about what he thinks about how designers are taught, either in education or when they self- teach in terms of tooling and software. Also, where does he see the culture of designers moving towards when we start to build more open source tooling.

[00:10:44] Andy tells us more about Kaleidos, Penpot, and Taiga.

[00:12:05] We learn from Andy what people are doing with these design tools that are making it more inclusive.

[00:15:54] Memo asks Andy how Kaleidos decided to invest themselves in building this platform.

[00:19:24] Andy explains four things that they consider contributions from a community member for Penpot, and Memo explains what they are doing at Open Collective with contributions.

[00:25:13] What does Andy see in the future for collaboration?

[00:28:10] Perrie wonders where people can make contributions to Penpot, and Andy tells us.

Quotes

[00:04:48] “When I think about that, I think that is a bit sad because to be honest I also have worked with open source tools.”

[00:05:59] “It was a journey and now I can say I am fully committed to open source projects and to the open source committee as well.”

[00:08:48] “Because, well in general times, I still believe that the tool should not be important, but the truth is that it is, and the tool is also a political space which is something that we usually forget.”

[00:10:00] “We are trying to break this, we are trying to break this model and we are trying to build a tool that helps the inclusion of the students, on every process, on every work done that they can share.”

[00:18:55] “We really want the designers to be first class citizens in the open source design worlds which we believe that is something that is not happening right now.”

[00:26:32] “There is a pain, there is a true pain when connecting all the dots, when connecting calls to design, design to calls were not in content to your designs.”

Spotlight

[00:30:10] Andy’s spotlight is Pure Data Software for visual programming.
[00:31:03] Perrie’s spotlight is Open Source Community Africa Festival.
[00:31:38] Eriol’s spotlight is a tool called Bitsy, a pixel game creator, by Le-doux.
[00:32:40] Memo’s spotlight is a book called Interaction of Color by Josef Albers.