What kind of design?

It helps to be specific about what kind of design expertise your open source project would benefit most from.

• Branding? For when you want a more focussed, professional, appearance. Update the logo, define identity guidelines, design the project website.
• Interaction design? Improve the workflows in your app. Optimise form layouts, decide what goes on each screen and how you get from one to the other.
• Information architecture? Structure information, reorganise the (marketing, documentation, forum) sections of the website, define a content strategy and maybe some copy writing.
• Interface design? Bootstrap only gets you that far. Bring the interaction design to life with clear and consistent styling.
• …and then some, but these four make for a good first check.

Start tagging issues that you think would benefit from design input with a general “design” tag. You can then point the designer to those issues. This makes it a lot easier for the designer to tell where to start with what kind of design work to make a useful contribution.

This post triggered by Garth who did this quick check with somebody while chatting in the #opensourcedesign channel on IRC, which you should join too.