Fully agree, I'm a dev and he lost me at step 8. Until that step the ideas were awesome, but the weird layout starting from step 8 just ruins it for me.

Disclaimer: I'm a developer, not a designer.

I got started by doing little tweaks and or fixes here and there. After a while the fixes turned into features and it grew from there. Now I'm preparing the next major release of preactjs (alternative to react that is used in google amp). And yeah... our website is a bit "bare" and designed by coders :D

The most important part about contributing is finding people you love to work with. In the preactjs team we do admire each other's work which makes working with them really fun. But there were also other experiences in my past with other projects where it didn't really work out.

I guess it just depends on finding something that you are passionate about and see if they need a help on the design front (most oss projects do!). That will usually attract like-minded people and you'll spent you're time on something to which you have a connection instead of a random project :)

Developer here. Thank you so much for your comment. I've pretty much encountered well the problems you listed at some point in my career. We usually have to interface with adding legacy systems which have weird constraints like that. It's often out of budget to fix those.

Communication is indeed key for a smooth collaboration between design and development. Nobody likes being treated as a monkey. Mutual respect goes a long way.

To amend to your excellent list:

• Management is shit: Forces developers into never-ending death marches and way to short deadlines. Design usually takes a backseat in this scenario (experienced that at multiple companies. Stay away from those!)

omg, this is the best easter egg ever!

Nice, that's actually my birthday! I'm excited about what you all have been working on :)

That link is broken. Entering the domain directly works though. Love the subtle circle reveal on the thumbnails. Also first design in a long time which really manages to pull of a dark design +1

• No concrete deadlines, or if there are deadlines, they are extremely rushed
• Lack of strategy behind the overall product which makes designing for it feel like sword fighting in the dark

Oh my god! Just this! So many projects could've gone a lot smoother if it weren't these 2.

It's surprising that we still have to deal with that in 2017 :( The landing page itself is amazing, the scroll-jacking only distracts from an otherwise excellent experience.

This! On the current project I'm working on the project manager does stand ups where alle participants (about 12) have to give a quick run down of everything they have done the day before, what they plan to do today and announce possible road blocks. After 3 people nobody listens anymore. Not everybody needs to know everything about each other.

Like Matt already said: keep it short!