Drawing on Success

Krita [1] is well known for having evolved from a toy to a tool for professional artists [2]. In late May, the Krita Foundation announced Krita 3.0, the Animation Release, after the conclusion of a successful crowdfunding campaign [3] to support ambitious last-minute features. The campaign raised more than £42,000 (~$47,500), with a third of its £30,000 goal pledged in less than two days. I talked with Krita maintainer Boudewijn Rempt about the introduction of animation, improved text tools, and revision of vector graphics – three of the major features that debuted in version 3.0 [4].

"Feature requests are a tough thing to get right," Rempt observes. Sometimes, new users ask for something that is obscure or fits poorly with the other features. Other times, a developer might want a feature for themselves. However, usually, that's not how the project develops its roadmaps.

"Usually it's pretty clear from discussions that artists have on the chat channel or the forum, or even in our bug tracker, where the real problems are. And, of course, we have many artists in the development team. They join us at sprints, and they are always around on the #krita IRC channel. So, gradually, a sort of consensus about the priority of different feature requests arises, and we start asking people to do mock-ups and user-experience designs."

[...]