> It feels good as a designer who's not able to easily contribute to the open source community.
You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things.
Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.
I've tried with mixed results. Some OS projects have been super grateful for tiny things such as favicons and logo vectorisation, but in my experience most tend to acknowledge but not implement work sent on spec.
After a quick search I've just discovered opensourcedesign.net which I'll definitely look at contributing to. This would be great for designers portfolios http://opensourcedesign.net/jobs
It's a tough nut to crack. Open source contributors tend to want to dive in and make the one patch they want without engaging in any design or feedback process. Installing that process means someone has to take up managerial duties. Most projects stumble along with a "one coder army" who expedites these processes by assuming anything they can't do on their lonesome is out of scope, and all feedback, patches or design ideas are strictly suggestion. Switching to a team management approach when a project gets big is a big source of friction since it's rare to have a strong solo dev who is equally capable at giving up direct control and delegating. Usage of a project is often mismatched with development energy, creating unbalanced workloads.
So the tendency ends up being that a lot of projects just stay small and go out of their way not to grow, even when they address a problem that demands more scope than they have.
My suggestion given all of that is to not give up, but focus your design energies on the inspirational: if you produce mockups and prototypes that are hugely compelling, someone will come out of the woodwork to realize some of them: you may not know which ones or when, but you're giving them footholds in approaching the problem.
Yes, I've not tried submitting pull requests or forking code so I don't have any experience of the etiquette or protocols needed like developers must have in spades.
Very interesting point about inspirational mockups, definitely food for thought!
You do need to purchase the font to use it to make the logo.
Forcing an open source project to pay roughly $200 for a one time use is a bad decision. Using such a typeface in a logo is a poor choice because that mean you can't embed it easily for free on the product's website (let's say to use as the font of your titles or to use text on the logo instead of using an image). The problem with embedding a font on a website is that by doing so you are not "using" the font but "redistributing" it.
In the end they used Arvo which was a really good choice, they were able to easily use it all over https://pugjs.org
You would be surprised how helpful it is to simply offer design insights for free. A lot of projects are maintainted by programmers who have zero design notions and who are not even aware of the little things.
Offering a free mockup to an open-source project is also very valuable.