Offering help - Where do you need me?

[codepotato]

Hey @edwh and team.

I'm really keen to help out with the front-end of Freegle as we're fairly heavy users of the service and it pains me as a developer (day-to-day) that no-one has given it some love in terms of the UI (apologies for any offence!) so I would LOVE to get involved.

As a bit of background, I run codepotato.co.uk during the day, and am a dab hand at php (laravel) all the way down to css and js. At codepotato we've recently finished a project where we helped a financial network revamp the look and feel of their own portal through CSS changes only, so I know I can help jazz up Freegle.

So, if you're looking for some help on the front-end, where would you like me to start? Any particular areas that need more love than others?

Whilst i'm here, does Freegle have a brand pack / guidelines at all?

I know the site is based on Bootstrap but have you guys considered creating a design system for the site (standardised components for the UI, such as buttons, label placements etc?). Very happy to help out where I can!

Point me in the right direction of screens and i'll get my crayons out 👍

[codepotato]

Oh and my github profile shows very little activity, as we use Bitbucket for our projects at codepotato!

[edwh]

@codepotato for the love of God please... I would be the first to admit my shortcomings in terms of the design side, and also my lack of bandwidth. One of the key reasons for open-sourcing this is in the hope that someone would come along and write pretty much what you've written, roll up their sleeves, and get stuck in. We are crying out for someone with some design panache.

My main todo list is elsewhere, but there are a few issues on here to act as a teaser and simple tasks to get people started. I'll reply to your comments on those.

In terms of a general area that needs love, I'd say the chat. There's a lot of work needed there to make it feel pleasant, ranging from smaller scale items like how the scrolling to the bottom of the chat window works to larger issues about the whole approach of a list of chats and then a message pane. But start with smaller stuff to get yourself up and running and get hooked :-).

We don't have anything as organised as a brand pack / guidelines. There's a certain logic to it (e.g. primary CTAs on a screen are green) but you could certainly bring some consistency and improvements here if you wanted to. The CSS we have on top of bootstrap is a mess.

Would be very glad and relieved to have you contributing.