Plasma Sprint 2025 – A Recap

This year’s Plasma Sprint had a very special meaning for me. For the first time, in a long time, I feel like I am contributing something big for the community. It has the potential of setting our development process on steroids.

The goal is to remove so much designing from the work our developers do and bring more design to the hands of designers. That way we can all communicate better and focus on the things that we do best.

My goal for the sprint was to get buy-in from the development team to start the process of implementing our design system foundations. The days were long but the team was positive about this change. While we don’t know exactly how big things will get, we at least are committed to delivering an easier development platform for our Community.

With that in mind, I completed (first pass) the work on making monochrome icons. I then started making colorful icons for our colorful collection. I was able to get a good idea of what works well for us.

A couple of amazing things allowed me to make better icons. Qt 6.9 onward contains a bigger implementation of TinySVG which now allows us to use Gaussian blurs and offsets to create shadows and gradients. If you didn’t know this, our previous icons had to rely on cutouts and tricks to generate gradients. This added a tremendous amount of graphic development time. However, with this change, we don’t have to do this kind of work. I am so excited for this. So excited that I wanted to show you a preview of the colorful icons:

Please note that these are still in early development and there is a lot of testing that I need to do to make them viable and visible for users. They may change a lot between now and the time they are provided. However, my goal is to have a complete Breeze icons replacement that users can test by Akademy 2025.

So while all the friends were coding, I was clicking away 1000 clicks per minute to get this part going forward! haha.

We also decided to map our design system variables to the elements provided by Qt. I will be doing that work as well and already set up a project in Qt Creator to get started. Should be able to share that with the team soon.

All in all, I was happy to see everyone, develop awesome software together and I am looking forward to our next gathering in Berlin later this year.