notmart wrote:

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:

Basically style as "fill:currentColor" rather than having a color directly and class "ColorScheme-Background"
Plus the <svg:style> element under defs. The final result should look exactly identical (the css stylesheet has those colors).

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

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

about the clock photos, i kinda like the last two, but is just my 2cents, looking forward to what you come up with

do we need the white border? i'm always against them for w/ compositing. i have done my idea, with a fresh svg, because i dont like the air one, there is so much old stuff in svg and the pathes have some ugly aligns that always end up in a gap between some elements here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6x8cc ... sp=sharing

plusfabi wrote:do we need the white border? i'm always against them for w/ compositing. i have done my idea, with a fresh svg, because i dont like the air one, there is so much old stuff in svg and the pathes have some ugly aligns that always end up in a gap between some elements here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6x8cc ... sp=sharing

take a try to the current widgets/background in the repo, i tried to make it without white border

notmart wrote: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:

Basically style as "fill:currentColor" rather than having a color directly and class "ColorScheme-Background"
Plus the <svg:style> element under defs. The final result should look exactly identical (the css stylesheet has those colors).

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)

Awesome thanks Marco! So if I understand this correctly, it'll look for that class and colorize to the Plasma color scheme color (background in this case)?

notmart wrote: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

I went ahead and set the tracker to allow edits. Re-order away! It'll definitely be helpful understand which files to tackle first.

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

Fabian, I'm using Cardboard Grey from the Next color scheme below.

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

That xkcd clock would be awesome, if not as the clock applet, then definitely as a applet all it's own!

That second pic or something similar would be kick ****. It should be possible to get it visually asymmetric within the confines of the technically-centered "clockface".

alake wrote:Awesome thanks Marco! So if I understand this correctly, it'll look for that class and colorize to the Plasma color scheme color (background in this case)?

yes, the available colors are in the stylesheet. It should be testable and working in plasma1 as well
pretty much is background color, text color, view background color (for the white areas, if we'll decide to add them) button background and text (same as the normal ones currently, just semantic difference) and button hover and focus colors (two shades of blue currently)

colors like the danger-red are probably not needed to come from the stylesheet, since red would probably be red everywhere, but if they are needed could be added (would work only in plasma-next in this case)

alake wrote:I went ahead and set the tracker to allow edits. Re-order away! It'll definitely be helpful understand which files to tackle first.

cool

plusfabi wrote:do we need the white border?

So, in support of the overall mood goals, I was trying desperately to avoid any edge highlights of any sort. The material properties we're trying to evoke is clean, flat, smooth paper (in this case with some translucency a little like vellum card stock). So the first thing I did was remove any edge highlight. A curious thing happens when I did this though: the edge starts to lose it's sharpness and soften and the panel background sort of starts to lose its impression of flatness. It's not the pixels doing this, it's mah brain. I also know we didn't want a heavy, super high-contrast shadow. So I started to add just a touch of highlight at a time back till the edge started to sharpen up again and the panel seemed to flatten out again.

So I try to evaluate what I'm actually seeing in the full context of a representative environment, not just what I know about the raw pixel data by looking at it in Inkscape. I definitely don't want a bright, liney edge. If it's necessary, a well done, very subtle highlight shouldn't even be seen by the brain. All our brains should be seeing is flat, smooth, sharp translucent paper. We should totally tweak on this until we achieve that!

Ooh and a quick note on shadows:
Shadows under translucent objects in real life affect the light that's transmitted through those objects. Plasma 1 themeing, as far as I know, only renders the portion of shadow that bleeds beyond the edges of the translucent object. Beyond blurring, it doesn't really affect the rendering of artifacts under the translucent object. Plasma 2, based on Marco's explanations, appears to afford a more powerful model to affect how the light from under a rendered object are altered by that object and it's shadow. The reduction in light caused by the shadow affects the brightness, saturation, etc. All this to say, we have an opportunity in Plasma 2 to achieve our design goals in ways we haven't before. Which is why I think it'll be extremely helpful if Plasma devs and whoever else might be running Plasma 2 chime in to help us evaluate how things are looking.

notmart wrote:

plusfabi wrote:take a try to the current widgets/background in the repo, i tried to make it without white border

with 95% opacity? i'm more and more confused of all the work here :/ it would be nice to have a style guideline and re-do the widgets from scratch instead of just use air, change color, remove something. this will make the svgz smaller, better to understand for external artworker (and me) and easier to replace.

Mann i just feel like a grouch >.<

now that integrated stylesheet somehow broke my svg..

edit.. why does inkscape change the line:
"opacity:0.8;fill:currentColor" to "opacity:0.8;color:#eff0f1;fill:currentColor" :/

plusfabi wrote:i'm more and more confused of all the work here :/ it would be nice to have a style guideline and re-do the widgets from scratch instead of just use air, change color, remove something. this will make the svgz smaller, better to understand for external artworker (and me) and easier to replace.

Mann i just feel like a grouch >.<

now that integrated stylesheet somehow broke my svg..

Sorry to hear that Fabian!

I wouldn't worry about the technical specifics of the plasma svgs. The artwork is the hardest part. We're all part of a team and a community, so others that are more familiar with all the technical stuff can pick up where we leave off. Honestly, I think if all we delivered were files with the raw artwork, the Plasma devs would be very happy and they (and perhaps others here) have the skills to take that and run with it. Not that we won't try to do more, but I personally consider the artwork as the primary deliverable here. The technical stuff can be sorted out later.

So let's spend our energy on the artwork. Our current guide for the artwork is that color palette, paper-like materials and a futurist, human, polished vibe. I say we take that and run with lots of ideas, lots of mockups, lots of tweaking.

Since you have the excellent icon design skillz, would you be ok with taking a shot at the artwork for plasma icons? Just post ideas and pics for them here and we can worry about getting them into the right technical package for Plasma Next later. The current icons in need of artwork are:
amarok, audio, battery, configure, device, document, edit, go, kget, klipper, konv_message, konv_message, ktorrent, list, media, nepomuk, notification, preferences, printer, quassel, slc, wallet, window, zoom

No matter what, we'll always get a chance to chime in on whatever we come up with and work together to deliver something truly amazing!

plusfabi wrote:edit.. why does inkscape change the line:
"opacity:0.8;fill:currentColor" to "opacity:0.8;color:#eff0f1;fill:currentColor" :/

ah, yeah, it likes to do that, i'm not sure why(especially because it doesn't always do it), in tools/currentcolorFix.sh there is a script that fixes it

Ok, I pushed some more updates to the repo. For the controls I basically went with Marco's mockup as a reference with some very minor tweaks.





The more I work on the plasma theme, the more it's becoming clear to me that the bulk of any visual refinement can only come from improving the layout design of each applet. But it'll definitely be nice to have the plasma theme done to support that. I updated the tracker as well.

I'll try to tackle the tasks manager theme next. If anyone has ideas, feel free to post.

alake wrote:Ok, I pushed some more updates to the repo. For the controls I basically went with Marco's mockup as a reference with some very minor tweaks.





The more I work on the plasma theme, the more it's becoming clear to me that the bulk of any visual refinement can only come from improving the layout design of each applet. But it'll definitely be nice to have the plasma theme done to support that. I updated the tracker as well.

I'll try to tackle the tasks manager theme next. If anyone has ideas, feel free to post.

Starting to look nice:D and i completely agree that the actual layout design is the most important thing (a different theme can only go so far)

On the look in particular, i would try to give rounded corners at least a 2 pixels radius? (so that when rasterized actually appears slightly rounded, not just the corner pixel appearing slightly transparent)

On the taskbar, given the look in the mockups, i was wondering if it should look different in the 4 possible panel locations? (same thing would be for tabbars)
in case those new elements will be added, tough it won't be possible to test drive them in plasma1 (and that's fine as well since that too will only get so much far)

notmart wrote:On the look in particular, i would try to give rounded corners at least a 2 pixels radius? (so that when rasterized actually appears slightly rounded, not just the corner pixel appearing slightly transparent)

Great feedback Marco. That helps. I was wondering if I should do that while putting it together, but I wasn't sure how close we wanted to stick to the mockups. I think I'd prefer 2 pixel corners as well. I'll tweak that tonight.

notmart wrote:On the taskbar, given the look in the mockups, i was wondering if it should look different in the 4 possible panel locations? (same thing would be for tabbars)
in case those new elements will be added, tough it won't be possible to test drive them in plasma1 (and that's fine as well since that too will only get so much far)

Are you talking about the location of the active/inactive/minimized window indicator like this:

panel at top:


panel at bottom:


Yeah, that'd make sense to me. Is there a prefix we should be using in the tasks.svg for the panel location top/north, botto/south, etc.?

Also, is there a similar indicator for the currently selected systray Icon?

Thanks again for all your help and patience Marco!