Now that we're sorta aligned on a general direction, I thought I'd create a thread to sort the details of the Plasma theme. For the moment, the plasma theme appears to be among the most immediate needs. Per Jens request, Fabian(plusfabi) and I will be the VDG focals to help work through this but, of course, everyone is welcome to jump in and contribute.

What we have:
1. Marco's proposed controls:


2. A peek at Fabian's systray icons:


3. A clear understanding of how translucency in Plasma works in actuality here and what to use for mockups (95% opacity).

4. A few mockups of plasma apps I've done:


What we need:
1. Agreement that the above gives us enough of a starting point to begin theme development. (I think it does).
2. A working name. (I'm drawing a blank on this one.)
3. A git repo work area. I think Marco offered to set one up in his scratch area with the current plasma theme as the starting point. Just holler Marco if you do this. Otherwise I'm happy to set up a repo in my scratch area. For others, don't worry if you're not familiar with git!
4. Flesh out any remaining visual questions (taskbar design, selected items, shadows, highlights, etc.).

Feel free to post mock-ups, suggestions, ideas, progress, whatever till we get this knocked out.

Hope this helps!

There. Looks so nice, clean and has the "this is KDE Plasma" signature. Where can I download it?

Item #3 done!

Marco graciously created a git repo for us to work with here:

http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fma ... -theme.git

Just speak up if you need any help cloning the repo.

what i dont like here is that we have again a background on a background, thats something we already had in air. developers pick up things like this for other plasmoids and it starts to be ugly. so please let us leave it with 1 background color.

€dit:

for the icon size. the REAL size is 24x24, (a icon on a 24x24px background). Now whats a good size for the icon "content" (the black stuff)? for tilain i used 16x22 (HxW), because 16px works great for smaller plasma bars. So for me this is the best option. (you can see, the 3rd and the last icon are in 16x*. the 2nd and 3th are in 22x* and looks a little to much, for my taste.). the big problem is that some icons are hard to make with a height of 16px. (like WiFi connection)

plusfabi wrote:
what i dont like here is that we have again a background on a background, thats something we already had in air. developers pick up things like this for other plasmoids and it starts to be ugly. so please let us leave it with 1 background color.

With background on a background you mean the completely white part?

plusfabi wrote:
what i dont like here is that we have again a background on a background, thats something we already had in air. developers pick up things like this for other plasmoids and it starts to be ugly. so please let us leave it with 1 background color.

Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback on this Fabian. From from a visual design standpoint, that's not a "background on a background" as much as it is simply using color (white in this case) as a grouping element. The downside to having everything in the same color background is that it often diminishes the information hierarchy - just a bunch of text and icons in a sea of chrome. It makes it harder to discern the the relationship between elements and can honestly look quite dull and chrome-heavy to me. While we may be able to creatively compensate for this in some cases, I'd encourage us to not rule out the sensible use of color as a grouping element.

plusfabi wrote:€dit:

for the icon size. the REAL size is 24x24, (a icon on a 24x24px background). Now whats a good size for the icon "content" (the black stuff)? for tilain i used 16x22 (HxW), because 16px works great for smaller plasma bars. So for me this is the best option. (you can see, the 3rd and the last icon are in 16x*. the 2nd and 3th are in 22x* and looks a little to much, for my taste.). the big problem is that some icons are hard to make with a height of 16px. (like WiFi connection)

I totally with you on having some decent padding around the icon content.

alake wrote:Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback on this Fabian. From from a visual design standpoint, that's not a "background on a background" as much as it is simply using color (white in this case) as a grouping element. The downside to having everything in the same color background is that it often diminishes the information hierarchy - just a bunch of text and icons in a sea of chrome. It makes it harder to discern the the relationship between elements and can honestly look quite dull and chrome-heavy to me. While we may be able to creatively compensate for this in some cases, I'd encourage us to not rule out the sensible use of color as a grouping element.

Thats true for this "kickoff" like menu. But i have seen this on other widgets (veromix) and thats what i fear again. :s

Also i have to say that i dont like the text color... its so weak, even on a pure white background, we need a better contrast and have to think with users who have a bad screen with lower backgroundlight power, like my netbook

Well I think its time that we show what it is we DO like instead of just saying what it is we don't at this point.

I think that if we stick to the same greyscale (the charcoal) for all text we will run into issues like inactive buttons. So we either inverse the text/button color or we decrease opacity and let readability hang. It's tricky because in a light theme large chunks of dark colors will attract attention so an inverted button with light text will be the first thing you focus on which probably wont do much for the efficiency of the user and his/her interactions with the desktop.

As for the white color - as long as we avoid it in widgets we're set. So lets use it as shown and keep it as a way to show relations between objects in those cases as it's needed. I mean what are the alternatives? Either boxes (and we have seen how horribly wrong a thin outline too many around a grouped set of objects can get) or dividers and I think we need to create a mockup of that.

(tomorrow when I'm done at the library I'll try to snag some time for it)

I went ahead pushed a few minor updates to the repo. They should be pretty uncontroversial:
- updates to the background color of the panel and dialog backgrounds to match the Next color palette.
- updates to the foreground color to match the Next color palette.
- A more subtle shadow for the panel and dialog backgrounds. On plasma 1 this is how it looks

I'm testing this on plasma 1 in 4.12. The opacity I used is based on the agreement in the mockup thread: 80%. I'm not sure how much of the cool translucent contrast trickery is in 4.12 (if any) so I'm curious if Marco or another Plasma Next dev could take a quick look at these minor changes and let us know if they're any glaring issues before we get too far. I'll be sure to post mockups for things that haven't been decided on yet.

There are quite a few files to update so I did up a quick tracker here.

If anyone has ideas for some of the more creative stuff like the artwork for the shutdown dialog (to replace the moon), analog clock and meters, please share.

It's coming tonight (errr so in 12 hours, its "morning" here) I've started on some ideas for shutdown icons and visuals as well as suggestions for clocks.

Actually the clock thing is bringing me one hell of a lot of problems. First of I never use the analog clock anyway so I never really got it but I am looking at old 1960's Swinging London clocks and the scifi-egg shaped ones right now trying to figure out how to redo them. The issue is that another idea was a clockradio style "flip-book" kind of clock with old time "scifi-number" fonts to use - but neither really works.
I mean the risk is that it becomes gimmicky and weird (like the "steampunk plasma theme" an idea turned into one massive gimmick).

Oh and Im working on sketches for wallpapers too... I thought three different new wallpapers (Nuno's and then two others, one image based and one more abstract but dark?)

I've idiotically spent the morning looking at clocks instead of writing for the damn university thing... And I came upon the xkcd clock... http://xkcd.com/1335/ might work? Like a scifi'y representation of earth rotating on the inside with a 24 h pattern on the outside?
Aside from that I've looked at different analog clock layouts from the 70's

Is there any different between the plasma model with "<element>, <shadow>" and that one with "<element>, <mask>"?

alake whats the color u used for the widget background?
i'm with #fcfcfcff + 80% visible

jensreuterberg wrote:I've idiotically spent the morning looking at clocks instead of writing for the damn university thing... And I came upon the xkcd clock... http://xkcd.com/1335/ might work? Like a scifi'y representation of earth rotating on the inside with a 24 h pattern on the outside?
Aside from that I've looked at different analog clock layouts from the 70's

just quickly chiming in on this, its whole shape should stay in a circle or in a square (both should work fine)

So I'll just use less of the area within the circle. Easy.

alake wrote:There are quite a few files to update so I did up a quick tracker here.

If anyone has ideas for some of the more creative stuff like the artwork for the shutdown dialog (to replace the moon), analog clock and meters, please share.

nice, well done
i taken a look at the files and are good.

however there is a thing that i would try to do, hoping it's not too complicated.. (look at my last commit in dialogs/background, or widgets/lider, widgets/background)
i changed the style entry in this following way:


plus the <svg:style> element under defs. The final result should look exactly identical.

This will be really necessary for icons, but since the style discussed so far is done mostly by flat colors, i would like to see how it goes for other widgets in general... wether this will be done from day one depends how painful is to do (worst case scenario i may go over elements and do this thing, even after the first release)


About the tracker, i would like to be able to maybe reorder the items, since not all elements have the same importance, and there are some that will probably even end up killed (like identicon*) so would be a shame if people put effort in them already