<shameless plug> A couple years back I was working at Bug Labs and we relied heavily on the Openembedded project. We contributed source code patches as you would expect, but one unique contribution was having our designer make a new logo for Openembedded. You can see it on their website today. </shameless plug>
This doesn't seem to occur to people very often, but if your company is relying on an open source project, source code patches are not the only way to contribute back.
Can you spare some time from your designer? Help out with a logo or website design work.
Do you have a doc writer? We all joke about RTFM, but if there is no manual that doesn't help much.
There are some things that developers don't necessarily want to do, so those areas often lack on open source projects based on volunteers. A company using their resources to fill in some of the gaps helps a lot.
I also don't understand why designers will compete on 99designs but don't seem to contribute to open source that often. If you are trying to break into the industry by showcasing your work, why prefer the 1 in 30 odds of having your design chosen in a crowd sourcing competition over actually helping out an existing project?
Some programmers passionately believe that contributing to OSS is status-increasing, perhaps enough to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have yet to meet a designer who believes this.
There exist UX paths by which contributing to OSS via code is easy, obviously wanted, and generates warm fuzzies. The fork-and-go experience of adding one marginal feature to a gem for Ruby then sending a pull request feels like ponies and sunshine every step of the way. By contrast, there exists no infrastructure or UX to support designers contributing in the same way. You probably have to send an email to a project maintainer. Try sending ten of those: report how sunny your ponies feel as a result.
OSS projects, in the main, very aggressively signal that they do not care about design. Just having a logo makes it look like you have super-anomalous levels of care relative to OSS. Designers pick up on hints like "your web presence is a default Github page" and "your logo was created by a programmer in MsPaint" to decide that their talents are probably better applied elsewhere, where they will be valued.
Also, 99designs will pay more designers more money today than entire communities of OSS developers will this year. Even starving artists can do the math.
I think just as large a part is that it's difficult for multiple designers to contribute to a project in a meaningful way without stepping on each others' toes. Do designers often collaborate in groups of more than two? (Layer Tennis is the only thing that comes to mind)
If I were evaluating a project I would choose a project with a default Github page over a project done in MSPaint just because there's a good chance that the latter was written by a developer who likes the MSPaint logo.
This doesn't seem to occur to people very often, but if your company is relying on an open source project, source code patches are not the only way to contribute back.
Can you spare some time from your designer? Help out with a logo or website design work.
Do you have a doc writer? We all joke about RTFM, but if there is no manual that doesn't help much.
There are some things that developers don't necessarily want to do, so those areas often lack on open source projects based on volunteers. A company using their resources to fill in some of the gaps helps a lot.
I also don't understand why designers will compete on 99designs but don't seem to contribute to open source that often. If you are trying to break into the industry by showcasing your work, why prefer the 1 in 30 odds of having your design chosen in a crowd sourcing competition over actually helping out an existing project?