It's a complex problem. Design agencies and individual designers are blighted by the spectre of "spec work" [https://www.nospec.com https://www.nospec.com] [htt

It's a complex problem. Design agencies and individual designers are blighted by the spectre of "spec work" [https://www.nospec.com https://www.nospec.com] [https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1 https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1]. The tl;dr of it is that business will approach agencies and demand they work on a product for free, of a a cost lower than the wok is worth in an act of good faith for the promise of fully paid work in the future. Except the work rarely comes. The upshot is designers are taught the value of their worth at college/university. The other problem is the FOSS community itself. See the concurrent post about GIMP [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624055]. Opinionated devs that either don't see the value of design or having a designer. I know that this isn't true for all projects, but there a bad apples amongst the bigger, more well known projects (GNOME for example) that will spoil it for everyone else. Again, GIMP is a great example of this. As a result, most 'passion projects' lead to designers working on small projects that inspire them, which are rarely software related, ore they look to create something that can provide an income, either as a small second income or as a new business.