How do you feel about elementary OS? [0] They spend a lot of effort on UX and it's the project I personally believe has the most chance to push Free Software to a wider audience, but on the other hand it's yet another project contributing to fragmentation.
I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate.
>libimageflow has ~10x the throughput of ImageMagick, yet puts security first. It is correct, fast, and has an evolvable JSON API. Imageflow doesn’t try to be ImageMagick; it supports only the core image operations and web-safe image formats needed by most applications and websites. This focus allows libimageflow to have a tiny and auditable codebase.