I just read that WordPress is holding a design challenge for a brush-up of the current administration administration interface for the upcoming version 2.8. Here’s an mockup of what they’re looking for in a new design:
I am very happy with the WordPress 2.7 interface, and I am even happier that it is going to be polished and made even better with 2.8.
Unfortunately, entrants to the challenge must be based on the .psd file by Matt Thomas, which in their own words is because:
We’re providing Matt’s .psd file for you to work from. Please do not create your own file and submit that, since if your design is chosen but your file isn’t in the right format, we won’t have time to let you fix it. Just edit over the layers.
The problem? .psd is the proprietary format of Adobe Photoshop, which is a proprietary program that costs hundreds of dollars that also only runs on other proprietary operating systems.
So because I choose to use free software for my day-to-day tasks which is morally better and technically superior (SVG is much better for such mockups), I and hundreds of other WordPress contributors would be unable to submit my designs for the competition because of the simple fact that they choose to be locked into a proprietary format.
Photoshop may be the most widely used mockup program among web designers out there. So what? It requires you to step into a world of proprietary non-free software that has ideals directly contrary to that which enabled WordPress to flourish in the first place, and expend hundreds of dollars that is simply unnecessary.
I don’t mean anything personal to anybody — at Automattic or Adobe — I just thought the folks at Automattic were into this whole open source thing.
Do not alienate the community that gives you your very existence.
The solution? Don’t just accept open formats created by free software; actively encourage their use — hire someone who knows how to use them.
Maybe time to get a gathering of people of the ground to overwhelm them with non .psd files?
Sometimes it takes for a person to be shown to understand what all the fuss was about.
Obviously it sucks, but can’t the Gimp edit PSD files?
GIMP has sort of reverse-engineered the format, but it’s only half-done. I tried to open the reference file, and as with a few .psd’s in the past, it just wasn’t right, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to work off that.
The problem is that of course Photoshop makes no effort to be able to export to a more open layered format, like XCF. So if Matt T is using PS to do his mock-up he has little alternative (if he wants to preserve the layer info).
Thanks for the well-reasoned thoughts, Jeremy. Jane Wells and I had this debate before she published the post. Neither of us liked the idea of requiring a PSD, for the very reasons you mentioned above. And I’m not really a fan of Photoshop myself. It is, though, extremely widely-used, and a fairly reliable “standard” among designers. I wish there were a better, free alternative, but, having used them before, the free alternatives are not better for me. (By the way — choosing not to use free software is not the same thing as not knowing how to use it).
That said, if we could do it over, we should have provided the PSD and screenshots as a reference, but allowed submissions in any format, so long as I could bring it into Photoshop for the final edits (even if that means just splitting layers into transparent PNGs).
With future design tasks, given the gift of a bit more time to prepare, we’ll do a better job of making sure no one is excluded because of the canvas they work on.
Thanks for the reply, Matt. It certainly clears things up a lot.
Hmm… maybe I’m way off-base here, but given that the WP admin interface uses PHP and CSS, what’s wrong with mocking up a design using, you know, PHP and CSS?
Why is Photoshop needed at all? If the .PSD file is simply for “design selection”, why can’t the selection committee select from *any* image file?
You are absolutely correct; *requiring* submission of a file in a proprietary format runs diametrically counter to the principles of freedom ostensibly espoused by WP.
The Adobe-love is nothing new. Automattic recently co-sponsored a laptop skin competition which also required submissions in PSD format. And promoted it on wordpress.com. Seriously, how likely is it that you’ll own a legally-acquired copy of Photoshop if you don’t even pay for hosting?
Jeremy, the PSD requirement is an issue, but, in my opinion, not the major issue with this “challenge”:
It was announced just as we are about to see the first public betas of WP 2.8 and while 2.7 has been out for 5 months now, and all this in order to cover up one of the several issues of another half-baked idea, the horizontal menu.
And, of course, there is going to be a poll: Polls are very useful — for justifying bad decisions: But it was selected by popular vote!
Cheers!
PS: Have you tried adding Liberation Sans before DejaVu in the stylesheet? It is a very good-looking professional, open-source font, by the same folks that designed Droid, the Android font — Many distros have it — Debian and Ubuntu have it in the repos.
Okay, this blog post seems to be turning into a forum for letting of steam about pet peeves with WordPress. Try and hold it in, guys!
P.S.: If you look in the stylesheet, you’ll see the font order goes DejaVu, Vera, Verdana. They are all very similar fonts with much the same dimensions (very wide). I’m not going to add Liberation Sans, as it has different dimensions — it is quite a narrow font, more in the same league as Arial.
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