Improvements for Gitlab Design Management for overall betterment of open source design

Community GitLab for Open Source
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Gitlab is a great combination of code, people and distribution which serves the purpose of open source and proprietary companies alike, by reducing redundancy faced by developers. In this way, a developer can focus on innovation and efficiency rather than writing lines of repeating code.

In the same way, I am trying to work on the redundancies faced by software designers and how design can become a more open field. The vision is making open source accessible for more people than just who could code. I want designers to help influence the design process in companies around the world by being able to share their work in progress and let people sample it.

I recently saw the documentation about Gitlab’s design manager- that is a great start.
I just believe there are two things missing-

  1. With so many people coming in, there is an abundance of tools and techniques used to build design assets. The current design manager only lets a user share a snippet of the design, and not the actual screen that was created and could be edited. What I mean to point out is, even though I can see the designs related to an issue, I’d still have to recreate them if I want to make any edits. This is solvable if the entire team uses one single tool, but what if people want to use different tools to create assets (just like developers who like to use different code editors to write the code)

  2. There is still no centralised platform for version control for designers. I have identified this issue in two stages of the design process- ideation and iteration, and envision bridging this gap between contributors working across tools and techniques.

Solving these two major problems could potentially increase design contributors in open source and improve existing open source technologies for everyone. This could also help proprietary companies reimagine how they design.

I want to work on these issues to add them to the existing design manager. So, I just want to know if the community is willing to help me take on this challenege?

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@likeanushkaa thanks a bunch for the thoughtful feature proposal and your interest in contributing to GitLab!

At this time, we have decided to deprioritize the Design Management category to focus on enhancing Portfolio Management workflows. This shift in focus means we currently lack the product management and UX capacity needed to fully support and guide community contributions like the one you’ve proposed. Without the ability to ensure proper product direction, user validation, and design support, we don’t believe it would be viable to move forward with this request right now.

While we value community contributions, this particular enhancement would require significant work to determine the product direction, conduct user validation, and create designs. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the necessary resources available to support this initiative properly at present.

Understandably this may be disappointing, and I sincerely appreciate your enthusiasm and willingness to contribute to GitLab. I encourage you to continue exploring ways to improve design processes and collaboration in the open source community.

I will also share this response in the GitLab issue you’ve opened to keep everyone informed as well.

Thank you again for your understanding and your ongoing contributions to GitLab!