It is not absurdly expensive to hire a design firm to do a project for you. Especially for a company such as System76. >> That is not only absurdly expensive,

It is not absurdly expensive to hire a design firm to do a project for you. Especially for a company such as System76. >> That is not only absurdly expensive, it disregards the actual situation: open source work in general suffers from a lack of designers willing to be involved. If this was a simple thing to do, I'd wager System76 would have already done it. I seriously doubt any statements that claim "if they could, they would have done" when it comes to great design in software or hardware. It essentially boils down to what the leadership thinks - if they think design service/teams are a cost center, forget about it. It will never ever improve. If the founders and the leaders of the company think that design is a core aspect of what they do and it should be part of everything at the company - from letterpads, to building design, to how they write and speak - then there is no way they cannot succeed.