Why (and how to) create attractive open source design
Without spending a fortune to make it happen
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In this week’s newsletter, we’ll cover why attractive branding is increasingly important for open projects, and some simple tactics you can use to make your content, design, and messaging more attractive and compelling to your audience.
Read time: 10-ish minutes
“A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.”- Rory Sutherland
The open source world can appear stale and uninspiring. Most projects are run by engineers who are mainly interested in building tools that work and sharing them, but not really in making them look good.
And this aim can seem superficial. If you don’t have a great product people are delighted to use, focus on that before worrying about branding. But once you have a great product or service, without an attractive brand, your project will miss many people it could be helping and who could help back.
Taylor Otwell, Laravel’s founder, decided to go against the sterile open source norm and has created a project that has taken over its sector, where most open projects follow the looks of influential projects like Apache, PHP, or Python.
Laravel is an open source web framework for PHP developers and is among the most popular web frameworks on GitHub. In 2019, it made an impressive $3 million in revenue.
For those unfamiliar with it, PHP is a robust programming language that has powered iconic projects like WordPress, MediaWiki, Joomla, Drupal and was used by 79.1% of all websites in 2021.
However, when Taylor started, PHP was already showing signs of decline due to its outdated appearance and marketing compared to alternative languages.
And to be honest, it still looks outdated as I publish this in 2023:
So beyond the technical aspect of his project, he noticed that the other competing tools in PHP were operating or viewing themselves as products and approached their projects in a “sterile, open source fashion” where they wouldn’t tweet anything fun or exciting. They would instead share things like “We have a new release. Here are the eight changes that were made.”
So he tried to make Laravel a positive, inviting, and fun place to be, whether that was how he interacted with people around the project.
Laravel was probably one of the first frameworks to come into PHP and market itself as a product in that way.
To do that, he built a framework that made it easier to use PHP for developers, and to come up with an attractive personality, he didn’t have to spend millions on expensive graphic gurus. He mainly imitated the friendly personality of the Slack brand and the minimalist and elegant character of Apple.
Steve Jobs also remixed other technologies developed and funded by public agencies to come up with the iPhone:
To make them look attractive, he remixed these technologies by imitating the branding pioneered by Dieter Rams through Braun:
So, despite what we were told at school, copying is a great way to learn and create. But don’t do it mindlessly. Let’s dive into the intentional way of doing it.
Learning to Remix to develop your taste and create content and design that people seek
If you aren’t a genius designer (I’m not), how do you create something that looks appealing and trustworthy without breaking the bank or hiring the best designers in your industry?
There are many books and articles on creating great code, photography, writing, and music. And this article is among them.
But none of it can help you improve until you see, taste, and appreciate what you’re trying to create.
If you think what you’re presenting is good, but others don’t, another tutorial won’t help.
But there are two steps from which we all begin:
Find an example of someone else’s work that you believe is good. A website that feels professional, a beat that inspires, an idea that’s unforgettable, a welcome that makes you feel like you belong.
Then make a version of it. Not a copy, but something that rhymes.
These two steps apply to any creation, whether it's a crowdfunding campaign, YouTube video, social media post, blog article, product design, engineering, music, paintings, landing page, book, or any other creative endeavour.
Laravel has become a hugely successful tool by mixing PHP with Slack and Apple’s branding style to make it more attractive to people.
Apple has become a massive success by developing its computer branding on top of Braun’s design philosophy.
By copying others, we can't see their entire decision-making process or how they executed it, but there is a gold mine of valuable ideas we can reuse. And very few creators take advantage of this.
So, how can you apply this to your work?
Step 1: Curate—Find 3 of the best examples to “copy”
It is hard to know where to start. But the key at this stage is to understand who your work is for. Once you know the audience you want to focus on, who are these people already following, sharing, and supporting?
Let’s go back to Laravel’s example.
Taylor Otwell knew he worked for developers like himself, and Slack’s and Apple's brands resonated with him as he was looking to develop a friendly but elegant brand. Many developers share the same taste for these two brands.
But this search for examples to study and remix can differ depending on what you’re trying to create.
For example, on Youtube or Reddit, you can classify the content of the Youtube channels or subreddits by the most popular.
On Twitter, you can download the extension Twemex to find a writer's top tweets.
On a website, you can use Buzzsumo’s free plan to find their blog’s most shared articles.
If you create a crowdfunding campaign, you can search for the most funded projects in your category and other categories on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Ulule, or any other platform. Once you have these successful campaigns, you can analyse the best rewards, pricing, duration, videos, photos, titles, text, or formatting and note what resonated with you.
But don’t study everything. You’ll learn more from looking at the most successful examples than from the average or failed ones.
After searching for a few influencers and websites in your space to understand the best topics and formats, you can now explore the content that most appeals to their audiences and see what you can copy and tweak that could work for you.
If you aim to create viral content, study existing viral content and formats.
If you aim to create high-converting sales or donation pages, study the best ones.
If you aim to create the best crowdfunding page you can, study the most funded projects in your category, but also other categories.
You get the idea.
Step 2: Recognise Patterns and Templatise—Breaking down and remixing other creator’s templates
Now that you have examples, it’s time to break them down and see what you can keep for your work.
Read or watch through the examples you’ve collected so far.
In Laravel’s case, once he had promising examples to remix, he might have broken down the brand's core elements:
Voice and tone: How do these brands speak to sound friendly? What do they say, and what don’t they say? What are some headlines and copy examples we can take inspiration from?
Typography: What are the brand typefaces for headlines, body copy, call-to-action, and user interfaces?
Colour: How do they define their colour palette to feel elegant?
Then, once Taylor Otwell had these guidelines on which to build, he probably broke down Slack’s website to see what to put on Laravel’s homepage.
As you can see, he follows pretty closely Slack’s homepage outline:
When you do this for your projects, you can use pen and paper, but I used Google Docs and screenshots to make it easier for you to understand and reproduce.
You can take screenshots of the website, article, video, or product you are analysing and paste them into a table. This makes it much simpler to remix the content with your twist and modifications.
But don’t feel like you must follow this process to the dot. There are thousands of ways of doing this, so do what better fits your style.
You can click here to access and copy the doc.
Step 3: Make it yours—Insert your content and twist
Now it’s time to come up with our creations.
In Laravel’s case, Taylor Otwell's twist was about adding a friendly and visually pleasing voice and visuals to PHPs. So, instead of sharing the stark aesthetics of open source projects, he added a warmer and more attractive design by "copying" Slack and Apple.
But what can your twist be?
It can be taking a piece that has already worked for a general or specific topic and adapting it to your particular topic, product, audience, or cause.
Or it can be taking something to a desirable extreme that no one else is daring to embrace.
For example:
Clothing that’s extremely durable (Patagonia) or extremely luxurious (Louis Vuitton)
Open source and full of configurations (Linux, Arduino) or completely closed but super simple to use (Apple)
Networked (Facebook)
Beautiful (Braun, or any art that has endured the test of time)
Noisy (Harley Davidson)
Very safe (Volvo) or very dangerous (X Games)
Overbuilt (Eiffel tower or Patagonia jackets)
Humorous (Tushy’s bidets)
We could explore extremes you could adopt to become remarkable for days, but if you want to dig deeper, you should read Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin.
Or your twist can be about the audience you address. If you are a profile writer sharing the successes of celebrities, you could do similar profiles focusing on remarkable women, sports clubs, Taiwanese people, homosexuals, regenerative leaders, and so on.
If we go back to the previous examples on Laravel, the founder took PHP, a stale and declining programming language, and by adding some design and personalisation inspired by Slack and Apple, he managed to give PHP a new life by making it cool and appealing to a lot of programmers.
RepRap and 3D Prusa have two open source 3D printers, but Prusa’s exploded because it bet on making theirs the most robust, easy to use, and affordable they could make.
What are you trying to change in the way things are done? Can you take it to an extreme your audience demands?
You have found the twist you can remix with other creations that have worked.
Step 4: Create—Do it yourself or hire someone to recreate it for you
Now that you have all of your ingredients together, you have two options: doing it yourself if you have the skills and necessary equipment, or hiring someone to recreate it.
If you do it yourself, you’re good to go.
And if you can’t do it yourself, you can always hire someone on a freelance platform or ask a charitable friend to help you.
For example, you will create a website’s landing page but don’t know how to code. If you can scrapbook pieces of what you want to have on your website and give it to a junior developer, it will cost ten times less since they’ll just have to put it together instead of designing it themselves.
To recap, here are the four steps to finding your own remix strategy:
Find 3 to 10 sources of inspiration
Break them down into key components
Inject your content and twist
Do it yourself, or hire someone to help you put it all back together
With these four steps, you have everything you need to find inspiration and create things that are in sync with the people you aspire to engage with.
And if you still feel uneasy about copying others, remember that everyone copies everyone else, whether we know it or not.
And when in doubt about doing it the “right” way, check the chart below and try Austin Kleon’s “elevator gut check” for your work: “If you met the artist you’re stealing from in a stalled elevator, would they shake your hand or punch you in the face?”.
To learn more about remixing and how the celebrities you know have done it before you, read the fantastic book Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon and watch the masterful Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson.
Now that you know about this trick, the world will never look the same as you’ll start recognising patterns everywhere—and soon, you’ll be inspired to create from everything you experience without needing to be a genius.
Opening photo credit: pmv chamara on Unsplash