Of Color and Software
It’s been a minute!
We have been hard at work making sure our design system keeps moving forward. For the past weeks, we have made significant progress in the space of color creation and icons.
There is also an easter egg in the form of PenPot. Read the rest!
As previously mentioned, we restructured our color palettes to have set color variations at various levels. We will combine those colors into tokens that will be named something like this:
pd.sys.color.red50
Meaning:
- PD: Plasma Design
- SYS: System token (We also have reference tokens and component tokens, .ref. and .com. respectively)
- Color: Token type
- red50: color name + color value
Note that as we follow Material design guidelines for these colors, we have a collection of 100 different color shades for a given color. Depending on the needs of the system or changes in design, we could decide to not use red50 but we would like more intensity. So we would choose red49, or red48, and so on.
The color variable name would change accordingly. This set up would allow designers and developers to understand the kind of token they are working with and it would be the same language for both developer and designer.
In Figma and PenPot, designers have the ability to name tokens however they like. I opted for keeping token names as we are recommending them for the Plasma system. That way there is good consistency.
This week, we consolidated these colors and we added them to the list of tokens in Figma and PenPot. However, there is still more to be done in the form of documentation for our Plasma developer team. We are still working through it, making sure we are accurate in the request for development.
Additionally, this week we had the pleasure to meet with Pablo Ruiz, CEO at PenPot. Mike, one of our team members met Pablo recently and spoke of our Plasma Next project. This led to a meeting to discuss the needs that our team currently has for developing a design system.
The team at PenPot is excited to partner with our KDE team and the Plasma Next initiative. They have generously offered a few resources to help.
This couldn’t come at a better time as very recently we have been hitting gaps in our team knowledge when it comes to developing design systems. This process is a first for our desktop system and we want to get it right. With the help of the PenPot team and the changes they are making to the application, this should be easier.
As such, we also decided to request prioritization for some of our tickets that would allow us to set up and migrate our Figma assets into PenPot and eventually, share these with the community at large.
Today, we are not close to releasing a full design system for others to use, but we are making good progress. Stay tuned!
We also moved into the process of editing 16px icons. Given that we already have new icons in the 24px collection that we can leverage, we cut the design time in half or more. We don’t have to brainstorm new icons, we mostly just have to edit the 24px icon and adapt it to a 16px version. This work just barely started but we are making good progress.
One area that is still up in the air is our colorful icons. Given we edited the monochrome icons, this calls for editing colorful icons as well. We have received many suggestions on what kind of colorful style we should follow. I would like to extend that invitation.
If you have seen or created amazing colorful icons and would like to suggest that style for us at Plasma, send us a comment!
That’s it for this week. Good progress so far!