Rethinking project discovery for open source with OnlyDust

OnlyDust is accelerating the pace of open source innovation by removing barriers for developers and projects alike, simplifying onboarding, tracking impact and rewarding meaningful work. It is where major open source projects like Ethereum, Sway and Foundry manage their communities.

We joined OnlyDust in early 2025 as their ongoing design team, engaged to help level up developer experience and project discovery.

Chapter 1: problem solving

As always, we began by workshopping possible solutions and making crude, low-fidelity mockups in real time. The point of working this roughly is that an idea costs almost nothing to draw and almost nothing to abandon.

We quickly zeroed in on a 'Starter Issue' approach

There is a steep learning curve to contributing to an open source project for the first time. By highlighting simpler projects and issues a developer could begin with, we maximise the chance of a first contribution actually being merged, which is the moment a curious visitor becomes a contributor.

Issue levels and gated access

We briefly explored grouping issues by level and gating access to each depending on how many successful merges you had completed. We ultimately decided that accurately predicting what level an issue belongs to, even with AI, would be easier said than done, so we parked it.

These scrappy mocks are what let us explore an idea like that and knock it on the head within an afternoon if it doesn't have legs.

Chapter 2: improving project discovery

The second problem was helping developers find open source projects they are genuinely passionate about. We wanted to do away with OnlyDust's 'wall of projects' and produce something that let people discover projects by several different routes.

The Discover page

We opted for a more traditional Discover experience, inspired by news sites, the App Store and online marketplaces, where items are served up in collections. Those collections can be swapped and rotated dynamically based on user attributes or the season, which stops the main page going stale, the failure mode of every wall-of-everything design.

See the full set of screens in the OnlyDust gallery.