9/25/2023

Open Sourcing Documenso's Design

Timur Ercan

Co-Founder

TLDR; Our design system is OSS under MIT at design.documenso.com

Today, we are open sourcing our design system, lovingly crafted by Thilo. The system is public on Figma and will be available at design.documenso.com from here on out. We are publishing it under the MIT License so everyone can share, remix, and use it as it helps them most.

We chose to start our first launch week with a design topic to emphasize the role design will play in Documenso's company and community culture. As it is historically difficult to bring together open-source software with great design, this is our first step towards encouraging a more design-driven COSS (Commercial Open Source) movement.

Designers Welcome

We added a designer role in our Discord to create a space for designers to explore and discuss design-related topics of Documenso and signing in general. In the future, we want to foster more coding contributions and start a design culture around the product. As it is much more difficult to incorporate design contributions, we have yet to find a clear plan of what that will look like. I would like to see contributions around stuff we are NOT working on. Designs in that area can inspire and start discussions without the complexities of implementing them immediately — a free-thinking space around everything Documenso. Having a free mandate to design without restriction can create many exciting ideas. Some Ideas worth exploring:

Areas for design contributions

• Explorations of exciting aspects of signing and document handling:
• What does signing look like when we no longer have skeuomorphic signatures?
• What is signing if we move beyond paper-inspired documents?
• What would the government process look like using Documenso?
• Solutions Concepts for features further down the roadmap, e.g., Widgets in websites

These are fascinating ideas for explorative design. They won't be built 1:1 but shape how we think about signing and where it can go, which is even more critical. If you are interested in product design, you are invited to join our Discord and discuss the future of signing design or the future of Documenso's design system. Also let me know what you think on X (formerly Twitter).

Best from Hamburg
Timur

• Design
• Open Source
• Community