Tag: fun

It’s Been a Minute… ðŸ‘‹

Hey all,

It’s been so, oh so long, since I have blogged. I have never been away, just not writing as much as I used. In the years in between there’s been a lot of work I have been doing.

Working with KDE and Plasma has been an amazing and rewarding experience. Through the years, we have achieved so much. Our desktop is now the default choice in the Steam Deck, Laptops, some Phones, many desktops, etc.

The team has really grown and comes together everyday with many interesting ideas and changes they want to bring to Plasma. Plasma is the most inclusive Linux desktop out there.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I said “no” to a merge request. Our developers do an amazing job at taking new input in. They run their designs through the Visual Design team and we all contribute to the development of great ideas.

We recently set the release date for Plasma 6. The culmination of many years of solidifying development, stabilizing our software and going with Wayland by default. All the while developing a next-generation backend with Kirigami.

(By the way, I made a new logo for it!)

Although it was our decision to make Plasma 6 a “boring” release, no major redesigns, this prompted many users to voice their desire to request changes at a larger scale. Maybe a new UI, new methods of interacting with the desktop, etc. While it is true that no specific efforts are being made to revamp the desktop visually in a major redesign, this has not stopped me from thinking and ideating through some of the things I wish Plasma could do.

I believe there are a few areas that still need a thoughtful approach for a successful delivery. For example, the role of Activities in the desktop and its relationship of task separation, widgets and their usefulness, our ability to integrate even more changes to the desktop, etc.

So… I started a little something. Since the advent of next-generation SVG editing applications such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Penpot, and others, the job of designers to build UI has become much easier and faster to scale. In Figma for example, you can create entire asset libraries that dynamically change when colors or branding change. Those changes disseminate to all other designs using their assets. They also invented “components” and “variants”. Correlated graphical assets that change to all the designer’s linkings.

Much of this work was propelled by Google and their publication on human interface guidelines for Android. This set the ground work that many applications drew from to build workflows that accommodate our current state of mass-produced design for nimble applications spread across multiple form factors.

Plasma has its own human interface guidelines. However, it’s clear that we haven’t kept up with the times. We don’t have a design system with pre-built components that users can take and build apps with. At least not to the level that others have.

These issues combined with the desire of building new UI for Plasma has got me thinking for a very, very long time. Questions of, what’s Plasma’s grand plan? What direction are we going visually? How do we want users to feel? have circled me over and over. There’s been great ideas in the everyday conversations we have. There have also been very incomplete ideas about what we want.

In all this though, I saw a glimpse of what we could be. Feeling inspired by recent design developments, I have started exploring building UI for Plasma in the same fashion I did for a previous iteration in the 5 series with Breeze and System Settings.

I decided to begin the process by selecting the best tools available to me for the work. I chose Figma, for now, while PenPot becomes as capable of handling the workflows I am currently using. I also chose the most complete pre-built graphical system available, Untitled UI. I carefully edited colors, fonts and sizes. I began some test designs to see how the coloring works and have been inspired by a few of the free offers from Untitled UI.

For now, I would like to show some of these colors I selected. I wanted to go for a variety of good middle ground colors tinted by blue having great contrast with each other. I leaned into the more vibrant areas of the spectrum for some of the colors and coordinated them through a few color palettes. The result pleased me and here is what I got:

And for secondary colors:

One thing I wanted to tackle is the lack of organization that we proposed with Breeze. We didn’t seem to have strong guidelines and positioning for our colors. We had a good mix, but it was invented before design systems were a “thing”. Therefore, our color mix may fall short on specifications. Using this template, I believe we can tackle those missing spots in the colors we ship.

DISCLAIMER

These edits and experiments are mine alone. I am not planning or releasing anything that could be construed as the “next” Plasma release look. They don’t represent the mind of the community and neither does the community have any plants to adopt any of this work. However, I want to explore as far as I can with a lot of detail hoping that the community at large can provide feedback.