GNOME has a paid designer for the next two years. Philipp Sauberzweig, a longtime volunteer on the GNOME Design Team, has joined Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency as its fellow for GNOME design and community management, he wrote on his blog.
Until now he has done that work in evenings and on vacations. “This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life,” Sauberzweig wrote. “It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in.”
What the fellowship covers
Day to day, he will give GNOME maintainers and developers design feedback and reviews, create mockups and coordinate work to standardize design patterns. Beyond that, he plans two longer projects: growing the design community and cutting the overhead of the team’s tools.
On the community side, Sauberzweig said design work is hard for newcomers to find because it spreads across many projects and often has no clear entry point. He plans blog posts, talks and workshops at conferences and hackathons, newcomer tasks with clear instructions (collecting examples, running accessibility and user tests, making mockups), and design reviews that double as mentoring. He also wants clearer membership criteria for the team and grant-writing help so contributors can keep going after the fellowship.
On tooling, he will update the team’s mockup templates for Inkscape and evaluate Penpot, an open-source UX design tool, for managing GNOME’s design system. If Penpot works out, he intends to build a component library that stays in sync with GNOME’s stylesheet.
Part of a larger cohort
The Sovereign Tech Agency’s 2026 fellowship cohort has 14 maintainers, community managers and technical writers working on Rust, Python and other open source ecosystems, after a pilot program in 2025. Sauberzweig is one of two fellows hired as employees; the other 12 work freelance. The agency said it received 20 applications for the employee positions and 150 for freelance spots.
Phoronix carried the news to a wider Linux audience. Sauberzweig has asked GNOME developers who want design reviews to contact him on Matrix.
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