“Can I even contribute design?” to First PR

I open with a simple moment many of us have lived. You find a tiny usability papercut in a project and think, “I am not a developer. Can I even fix this?” In this session, we walk that path together and turn it into a first pull request that a maintainer is happy to merge.

We start by picking a bite-sized issue that is small enough to ship. I sketch the fix in Penpot, then we check the basics using the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines — contrast, spacing, keyboard focus, and language. We map that sketch to tokens and components inspired by Sistent, so changes are consistent and easy for maintainers to review.

To help beginners continue after the meetup, I point to real-world places where design contributions are welcome, such as

• Government of India’s OpenForge challenges, which involve browse-submit-review-recognition steps

• Community spaces like Figma Community and Framer Community, where people share open files and templates

• International on-ramps, such as LFX Mentorship, Google Summer of Code, and Google Season of Docs.

• Open a real “good first issue” that touches a small UI element

• Sketch the fix in Penpot and validate with GNOME HIG checks

• Translate the spec to tokens and components that look like Sistent’s patterns

• Show a before-and-after diff and open a pull request draft with a ready-to-use template