After Akademy 2024

This year’s Akademy (KDE’s annual conference) in Wurzburg, Germany was a success!

Yours truly had a chance to speak during the Akademy days and present our new design system to the community.

As previously reported in my youtube channel and in my posts, we provided a set of design system foundations to the community for their use in the future. This means, designers and developers will more closely work in the design process.

A few new faces also appeared at the venue. This was amazing! New contributors excited about our technologies is always welcomed.

In addition to the main session, our Visual Design Team put together an additional Birds of a Feather (BoF) session the following day. I have to say that I have never seen this many people interested in our presentation before and I am greatly appreciative of their desire to help.

We split our BoF in 3 sessions. The main session was an exploration of our export plugin for Figma and PenPot (Authored by Manuel de la Fuente), and also a review of the actions the VDG (Visual Design Group) needs to take to publish the work in the design system.

Our second hour was dedicated to reviewing our visual changes acceptance guidelines (led by Nate Graham). This session was intended to speed up the rate of response for visual design changes in Plasma and other areas. This should help us go faster and be more effective in our decision-making process.

The work is tracked here:
https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/home

Our third hour was dedicated to Arjen Hiemstra’s new unified theme builder “Union”. Arjen showed us the source code and current capabilities of Union. It’s still early days but the progress is huge. There are a few new features that Arjen wants to add to the engine and we should see more of them in the near future.

Throughout the week, we dedicated time to testing and bettering the icons we produced. Our next objective is to address the latest round of feedback and then begin the process of editing our 16px icons to match our shapes in the 24px collection. Additional to that, we still need to find as many bugs as possible with the new icons.

During one of our sessions we noticed that some icons did not work properly in dark mode. This was a good test to do as some of the shapes didn’t recolor properly. Good thing that we were surrounded by Plasma devs and it was easy to spot the problem! This, however, does not mean the icons are free of issues. They still need a lot of work.

For now, I would like to invite all those who would like to provide feedback and/or test the icons. Please note that this is as alpha as it gets. There is a lot more to be done. Until all icons are finished, you can test the 24px collection.

Plasma Icons 24px collection:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oayQeHloyYJwL3WpjgoAQjR-Mnt-H8k/view?usp=drive_link

Figma link for icon feedback:

Soon enough, I will also edit a few of the images I took from the city and during Akademy. Needless to say, this one was by me!

Aren’t we cool?

See you all soon!