SourceHut is a software development forge and it is designed with the software engineer’s needs first and foremost. The design prioritizes things like page speed, minimal distractions, and information-forward layouts. It does not prioritize aesthetics, and perhaps it shows.
Like many free software projects, SourceHut encourages contributions from its community in the form of patches. Not all of these have to be changes to the software — we frequently receive patches improving the documentation, for example. There are many skillsets which are valuable to offer to a free software projects. One of these skills is design competence, and over the years a few people with this skillset have attempted to improve SourceHut’s design, but many of their changes were rejected. Why? How can a designer succeed in improving SourceHut?
SourceHut’s design space imposes constraints on the visual design which present more of a challenge to the aspiring designer than most of the projects they may have worked on. We are open to (and excited about!) improvements to the SourceHut design, but such changes must be implemented within the constraints of our ethos, and these constraints are often unusual and unfamiliar to the typical web designer. SourceHut is an engineering tool first and foremost, and all of our design decisions are made with an eye on solving problems for software engineers. This is the prime directive, and all other concerns, such as subjective aesthetic value, are secondary to the prime directive.
It is under this lens that any proposed design changes are evaluated, and for this reason many are rejected. A design change for SourceHut must be carefully thought out and must balance its aesthetic value with its effect on the utility, usability, and accessibility of the services. To offer a small example: several people have proposed making the source view centered to match the rest of the UI. However, this would introduce a horizontal scroll for files with long lines, making it more difficult to read them. The prime directive of this page is reading code, therefore this change was rejected.
Of course, looking nice does, in its own way, contribute to many of the same underlying values like usability and accessibility. A page which is pleasant to look at is more usable. The user’s enjoyment of the service is derived in no small part from its aesthetic value, and that’s important to us as well.
The challenge is thus to come up with designs which are aesthetically pleasing, but also meet our goals for broad accessibility and utilitarianism, while simultaneously communicating our values and priorities. Our values differ substantially from other platforms in this space. GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, they are all fundamentally speaking the same design language and expressing the same values. Because our values differ, our design should differ, and distinguish us from the pack in a manner which makes our principles visually evident.
A designer who hopes to rise to this challenge should understand and internalize these values, which is particularly difficult given the extent to which we reject the values of the mainstream “modern web”. Should you want to meet this challenge, the community would be thrilled to work with you. I would strongly recommend joining our IRC channels and seeking feedback early and incrementally — most design proposals for SourceHut fail due to seeking feedback too late or proposing a huge redesign all at once. So long as we work together, we will find success. Good luck!