Hello! Thank you for your interest in contributing to EFF's Open Source projects. We want to make sure you have all the information you need to make design decisions and craft a useful interface for our websites and extensions.
Most of our contributors work directly on improving the UI and functionality of one of our Open Source products:
Normally you'll open a Pull Request for your changes in the product repo.
If you want to contribute to other EFF products or websites, we don't have specific guidelines for you yet, but we'll be developing those in the future.
If you're looking for EFF's logos and brand guidelines, they're at https://www.eff.org/press/logos
Please open an issue on this repository if there's anything you'd like to see that is not covered here.
We have a few resources to help you develop better interfaces for our projects. You will notice some of these are not implemented in the product yet, but we're working towards a unified style and we hope you help us out!
- Our product style guide IMPORTANT!
- Logos
- Fonts
- UI code fragments and examples
- Other files (wireframes, buttons, fields)
Here's a few issues where design contributors are needed:
When your contribution to a project involves a significant UI change, the project maintainers will often ask the EFF design team for input and feedback.
- It takes us about two weeks to work on the issue and provide feedback. This can be much faster if your design is already using our guidelines and assets.
- If your design needs changes and/or we have suggestions, we will comment on your pull request (we'll be very nice!).
- If you have more general questions or a research proposal, please open an issue on this repo.
- Complete redesigns of any of the apps or extensions
- Significant changes on how UI elements look or work
- Logo or branding changes
We appreciate your time! Please don't send us full color high definition mockups first; let's have a conversation with a few sketches before you suggest a very refined version of your idea.
EFF is an organization that cares about security and privacy (among many other organizational values). As designers and developers for EFF's free privacy and security tools, we iterate on our tools to meet the following values:
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Simple: Our projects should be simple to use. In the case of our browser extensions, we want people to be able to download and have the tool work! We may deprioritize things that may be too advanced or complicate someone's use of our tool.
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Clear: Our projects should be simple to understand. At minimum, we prioritize designs that let people know how enabling an on/off switch or clicking a button, affects the tool's state or where the extension lives in their browser.
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Accessible: Our projects should be accessible to all users. We strive to make inclusive products that are usable and enjoyable. Some examples of how this manifests are prioritizing legibility, checking that color contrast meets WCAG standards, and using alt text. We especially welcome feedback on how we can improve the experience for users with disabilities. If you're interested in contributing to our understanding of how our software projects can be more accessible for people with disabilities, we'd be grateful for your feedback. See our user research section for how to get involved with our formal feedback cycles.
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Educational: Our projects should meet EFF's goals for informing the public. We are always looking for ways to give simple but relevant information to our users, whether that's onboarding for the tool, or for the dedicated learner, information on how third-party tracking works or how HTTPS protects your web browsing.
We also strive to meet the following additional parameters:
- Remixable: Our designs are CC-BY, and our code is open for remixing. Contributions to our open source designs would also be expected to meet these standards (e.g. graphics that are CC-BY licensed).
We love user research and we're often short on resources to user test everything we want. If you're interested in helping us with our goals of simple, clear, accessible and educational, we have prepared a specific guide if you want to help us with Research. We'd appreciate it!
Please review the existing issues on this repo. If you don't see an issue that addresses your question, open a new one! We actively monitor this queue.