Instead of looking for projects that are vocal about their needs for design, you can also find a project where you can provide the ideas for improvement. I think a lot of projects don't even have any designers contributing but would be happy for one to be proactive and help.

Makes total sense. I'd be curious to see statistics on how many people change their preference to dark.

I like this. Going to add it to Explore Monero where I added a small toggle next to the logo. It uses CSS variables to switch themes which makes the whole thing super easy to implement. Even easier with this media query now.

People might make fun of light/dark modes, but I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from people for it on this and another project. So clearly seems to be something people appreciate.

I agree and would just add that UX designers in this field currently need to be highly technical in order to shape the functionality in a way that a general audience can understand. Ideally, the UX crowd would also participate in shaping the direction of the tech foundation, but the tech is so intense that I don't think that happens very much at the moment.

My entry into this was that I just redesigned (really just restyled) the Monero wallet for fun and posted it on Reddit (here's the thread). The community liked it and a developer reached out to me and said he wanted to implement it. If you have an area you'd like to contribute to, that approach can work well.

I've also just shown up at crypto meetups, started talking to people, and ended up with multiple offers to help with projects. I'm genuinely curious about the field, so that was not some preconceived sales technique.

What I've also seen is people joining the Telegram or Discord channels of coins they like and just offering their help.

Crypto is all about community. So it's probably best if you look around a bit, find a coin or area that's of interest to you, and poke around the community a bit.

One of the harder parts about working in open-source is that everybody is basically just volunteering their time, people are spread out across the world. It can be freeing, but you also need to be OK with less structure. As a designer, you very much depend on others to implement things, and need to be very pro-active. Coming from an agency and freelance background, I'm also still getting used to that.

I'm also still learning and figuring these things out, but it really feels like a breath of fresh air overall. Even just having all my Sketch files and design files in a Github repo where everybody can improve them and use them if they want to, is a nice, new experience.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

From my experience with the Monero team, and going to meet ups, the people in the industry are super excited when a designers shows up and has some interest in the area. So if you are interested in the field, you have a ton of learning to do, but you might also find it much easier to get into than other area.

Luckily there are QR codes in a lot of places already. But yes, many wallets make you type or copy/paste addresses, which is also always a source of stress. I've been working with the Monero team and tried to get user-readable names for addresses, but one of the problems is that the blockchain doesn't have any way to store those names. They are always only stored in the local wallet, so those names wouldn't sync. Just one of those areas where decentralization makes things a little more difficult.

For making it more pleasant to enter and display those dreaded addresses, I put some thoughts together recently over here.

Lots of work to be done, for sure.

Do you think that's a good thing for Snapchat long-term? I understand the draw of celebrities to a platform for making money and getting exposure, but I takes away from the core idea of friends chatting and having fun. A bit like Facebook is having this struggle where it became all about news and clickbait and not so much about "meaningful" interaction between friends and family members.

The intro of the article is pretty good, the take-aways a bit too generic. What's exciting for me is that this technology is new and evolving. So as a UX designer, you can help shape the tech itself to create better experiences long-term. There's a of course plenty of the usually usability and styling work to do, but I can think we do more. It's a very developer-heavy community right now and more designers and front-end devs are needed.

Disclaimer: I started working with the Monero team on redesigning their wallet recently. Pretty excited about the project right now. Ping me if you would like to chat about it. Here's the design repo.

Very dramatic. I don’t understand why design at Apple and Google has to be seen as this competition where one company has to be awesome and the other terrible. They are different, they have strengths and weaknesses. If both do amazing stuff, we all gain. Let’s cheer good work, let’s criticize where it’s deserved. But let’s not look at it as a death match. YOLO