I hope I’m not breaking any forum rules here, but since we have this subforum now, it might be a good idea to share articles, books etc. that inspire you in terms of designing KDE.

This thread is intended for general or larger articles, videos etc. – if you have a specific idea that you want implemented, you should create a new thread (either in VDG, Brainstorm) or a bug/feature report.

To kick it off, I found Bret Victor’s talks and design ideas very refreshing and would very much like to see some of that get into KDE. Especially in the many years I’ve been using KDE so far (and continue to do so), I think KDE has a very good standing point to make software that makes it easy for others to create.
http://worrydream.com

This talk (at Google, but applicable to all design) covers some fundamentals involving cognitive science and design and has some really illustrative examples about why some strategies work better than others when designing for humans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2exxj4COhU

This article/guide by W3C portrays how very much personal names differ around the world and gives advice on how to properly handle that in UI as well as DB design.

The article starts off by explaining the differences by the use of examples and then continues with some suggestions how to set up your database and web forms (likely applicable to desktop UI as well) in a way where the database is useful to you as well as respects the cultural specifics of the persons being recorded in the database. The latter is important for usability, respect and ordering of data.

http://www.w3.org/International/questio ... onal-names

Seeing KDE is lot with people from different countries, I think this might be of importance.

Thanks for starting this thread hook!

Several years ago a read Bret Victor's Magic Ink essay which is at the worrydream.com site you shared. Magic Ink is just a fantastic essay that basically encourages focusing on designing to provide information as a priority over designing primarily for interaction. Anyone interested in software design should check it out.