For a long time I have been asking or thinking about, getting a designer-oriented tool to design icons, plasma themes, window decorations and window style editors available to designers. By that I mean, no coding necessary.
I tried making a plasma theme long ago and realized that it takes quite a bit. You have to make them as SVG and you have to cut all the parts and pieces properly to make them work for the corner of an image, borders, etc. You also have to label each bit and piece so that when it is loaded onto KDE, KDE is able to recognize where each piece goes. After all this is done, you also have to export each piece with proper names. All this is done manually. I know we have plasmate in the works now. But I can't help but wonder if we can simplify this design even more by making a program that can do this rather quickly and with minimal effort on the part of the designer. I believe is such a tool was available, our progress in getting more theme contributions would skyrocket. Just think of how many people could view KDE as a design platform. Possibilities are there.

Think for example about something along these lines for a plasma theme maker

anditosan wrote:You also have to label each bit and piece so that when it is loaded onto KDE

This is by far the hardest part of doing the themes, ID'ing each theme component.

However it seems to me you're confusing the Plasma theme with the Qt theme (judging from your mockup) the notification dialogs are indeed themed by Plasma but the application windows aren't nor the buttons in the windows, but the buttons in plasmoids are.

Uri_Herrera wrote:

anditosan wrote:You also have to label each bit and piece so that when it is loaded onto KDE

This is by far the hardest part of doing the themes, ID'ing each theme component.

However it seems to me you're confusing the Plasma theme with the Qt theme (judging from your mockup) the notification dialogs are indeed themed by Plasma but the application windows aren't nor the buttons in the windows, but the buttons in plasmoids are.

Yeah, sorry about that, I mostly mean the idea as a general approach to creating tool"s" to design parts of KDE's interface. The mockup above is "very" rough for anything. So I was wondering if there are ideas from the community about something like this and start some ideas.

anditosan wrote:Yeah, sorry about that, I mostly mean the idea as a general approach to creating tool"s" to design parts of KDE's interface. The mockup above is "very" rough for anything. So I was wondering if there are ideas from the community about something like this and start some ideas.

Your idea could simplify that process, still, you as a themer would need to make the resources for the theme, but just like, do the SVG file and let the software add the necessary data to the file so that Plasma can use it.

Uri_Herrera wrote:

anditosan wrote:Yeah, sorry about that, I mostly mean the idea as a general approach to creating tool"s" to design parts of KDE's interface. The mockup above is "very" rough for anything. So I was wondering if there are ideas from the community about something like this and start some ideas.

Your idea could simplify that process, still, you as a themer would need to make the resources for the theme, but just like, do the SVG file and let the software add the necessary data to the file so that Plasma can use it.

Defintively! I mean, if the software could automatically cut and label the pieces for a theme, that get's about 60% of the process done right there. It could even package the theme for you, install it on your local machine, or even upload it to kde-loo.org.