Creation Of The Design Working Group

[Mayaleeeee]

The design community within the AsyncAPI Initiative has been growing rapidly, and this year, I made a commitment to support and nurture that growth. Since January 2025, I’ve been observing the incredible contributions from individuals passionate about design, user experience, and community building.

Exactly six months later, today, I'm excited to officially announce the formation of the AsyncAPI Design Working Group!

This group has already held several informal meetings and discussions, and now we’re formalizing it as a space for collaboration, growth, and meaningful contributions from designers across the community.

Goal

The Design Working Group exists to:

• Grow and support the design community within the AsyncAPI Initiative.
• Encourage active participation and collaboration among designers.
• Elevate the importance of design and user experience across AsyncAPI projects.
• Demonstrate that design is a core pillar of the AsyncAPI Initiative, not just a nice-to-have.

Founding Members

• @Oloso-surur - Active Design Contributor, 2024 AsyncAPI Maintainership Design Mentee (Holopin Badge)
• @Shriya-Chauhan - Active Design Contributor, 2025 GSoC Mentee (AsyncAPI Website Redesign)
• @nwanduka - Active Design Contributor (Mascot Redesign)
• @TenzDelek - Active Design Contributor, 2025 GSoC Mentee (Conference Website)
• @jaishree - Active Design Contributor.

This group is open and welcoming to anyone passionate about design and user experience research.

Chair

@Mayaleeeee, the design lead, will be the initial chairperson, but it will be a rotating role.

Expectations of members in the working group

• Active participation in the Design working group
• Participate in setting the direction of the Design WG
• Vote for critical decisions (e.g., selecting new members, chairperson rotation)
• Provide insights and expertise to enhance the group's effectiveness

[BOLT04]

Hi @Mayaleeeee this seems like a cool initiative 😃, I don't have a lot of context around the design work that has been made in the community, so I have some questions before agreeing with the WG. Just some points I'm curious and want to learn more before agreeing 👍 :

• Regarding the bullet point "Elevate the importance of design and user experience across AsyncAPI projects". Could you give some concrete examples of AsyncAPI projects? For example I'm assuming the all AsyncAPI public websites would be a main focus (main website, all conference websites), but can you give examples of GitHub repos of these AsyncAPI projects you talk about?
• Will all meetings of the design WG be on the AsyncAPI YT channel?
• Are there any other design working groups or just OSS projects you know of, that we can take inspiration from? Maybe related tasks around branding, Figma design systems, etc. For example, I got curious if there are any similar working groups at CNCF that have the same goals you are proposing.
• Will AsyncAPI Figma related tasks be a focus, in order to then take this work into the front-end components in AsyncAPI codebases?
• What action items are already planned for this bullet point "Demonstrate that design is a core pillar of the AsyncAPI Initiative"? I'm not sure if there would be like GitHub issues in order to work on this, perhaps this point is related to all the above and the more concrete tasks

If you could help me with these questions, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks!

[Mayaleeeee]

Hey @BOLT04
Thanks so much for your thoughtful questions. I appreciate you taking the time to ask them.

The design WG isn’t new-new. I’ve been leading design efforts in the AsyncAPI community for a while now, mentoring, organizing, and designing, but it wasn’t officially called a “working group” until earlier this year. I got inspired to formalize it after our community manager reached out, and I saw how other WGs were structured. Before that, I didn’t really have the bandwidth to go all in on the “official” side of things, but the work’s been happening behind the scenes for over a year.

Projects Involved

Design at AsyncAPI has touched more than just the main website and conference sites (though those are big ones too!). Some examples of where we’ve contributed design work:

• asyncapi/website: Redesigning the site, doing UX audits, creating a design system, and working on accessibility.
• asyncapi/conference: Full visual redesign and layout structure.
• asyncapi/brand: mascot redesign, unified social media assets,
• asyncapi/cli: I actually did some design/UX enhancements here myself.
  -asyncapi/community: I mentored a design contributor last year who created the Holopin badges.

If you're curious, you can search “design” across those repos, there’s a lot there!

Design Meetings

Yep, all meetings are public and uploaded to the AsyncAPI YouTube channel. We’ve had a few already; feel free to check them out to see how we run things.

Other Groups for Inspiration

Yes, 100%. I’m part of the Knative UX Working Group and the CHAOSS Design WG. They both work on branding, research, website design, etc. I’ve learned a lot from how they operate, and I’m also bringing that structure and experience here.

Figma + Codebases

Figma is definitely part of the workflow. We've used it for many things, from the design system to full site layouts. The idea is that what’s designed in Figma eventually becomes the actual codebase. So yeah, Figma is very much in the picture; we’re even considering documenting better design-to-dev handoff workflows to make that process smoother for everyone.

Making Design a Core Pillar

I want design to be more than a nice-to-have. Some things we’re already doing to back that up:

• Creating proper onboarding for designers (Figma access, repo guides, etc).
• Making sure designers have a seat at the table early in projects, not just brought in at the end.
• Highlighting and recognizing design contributions the same way we do for code.
• Labeling design issues clearly across repos so contributors can find them more easily.
• Collaborating with devs to make design an intentional part of the dev experience, not an afterthought.

We’re still growing, but we’ve come a long way — and this WG is a step toward making that growth visible and accessible.

Thanks again for asking.

Happy to dig into anything more if you're curious. 😊

[BOLT04]

Awesome, thanks for your response 🙂. Yup let's make the WG official 👍

[Mayaleeeee]

Hey everyone! 😊
This is the discussion about creating the Design Working Group! If you have any questions, want to learn more, or are interested in getting involved, please feel free to comment.

Thanks!

cc @asyncapi/tsc_members