Contributing UX/UI design work to the OpenDesign app itself — where does it fit?

[BharanitharanKR]

Hi all. I'm a UX/UI designer who also does frontend development. I'd like to contribute on the design side of OpenDesign's own interface, the web and desktop app, not only the design-systems content. Before I start producing anything, I want to understand how design work is meant to arrive here.

What I found so far: AGENTS.md defines CSS ownership (tokens and global styles under apps/web/src/styles/, CSS Modules for component styles, shared primitives from @open-design/components) and an animation philosophy (ease-out curve, 200 ms in / 140 ms out). The ux label has eight open issues (#7582, #5418, #5370, #5368, #5352, #5244, #4877, #2625), and there are open layout and clarity requests like #2981 on the Home design-system selector, #4056 on aligning the plugin and live-artifact output surfaces, and #5549 on RTL alignment. I couldn't find a product-level design guideline or a source-of-truth design file for the app UI itself.

My questions:

1. Is there a design owner or an internal design source of truth (Figma, specs under specs/current/) for the app UI, and is it something the community can contribute to?
2. How do you prefer design proposals to arrive: an issue with before/after mockups, a spec document, or a discussion thread per surface?
3. Would a UX audit of one surface, delivered as a prioritized list with mockups before any code, be useful? Candidates I'd pick first: the Home design-system selector, Settings → Models & providers, or the Design Browser panel.
4. Are there design-direction constraints I should respect, for example the style(demo): UI polish round 3 — glass materials, browser add-to-chat, smoother tabs #5517 redesign that landed in feat(workspace-team): team workspaces, shared resources, workspace-scoped billing, and the #5517 redesign #6142, or the OD Next direction?

If the answer is "start with the open ux issues and attach before/after screenshots", I'm happy to do that too; I just don't want to produce mockups for surfaces that are already being redesigned internally.