Akademy 2025 Takewaways

This year’s Akademy was in Berlin at the Technical University of Berlin. The experience, as usual, was amazing. Unlike in previous years, there was a huge emphasis on styling, unification, and graphical work. This whole wave of talks was invigorating.

As a side note, this year our A/V was vastly improved and this should make it much easier for our contributors and viewers online to see and understand what we did. As part of the organization, I will help process these recordings and make sure they are awesome.

Once again I spoke on the progress with the design system. This year’s talk focused on our progress on icons. Definitively, one of the lengthiest pieces of work coming from the Foundations portion of the design system.

In addition to speaking on these topics, I shared the newly created (and definitively experimental) Ocean color scheme, light/dark, Ocean Plasma Style, and Ocean icon pack. In case you missed these assets, here you go: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oLVq0SViOFB6lur3qn0bwV7_gHzqu2KM/view?usp=sharing

One thing to note, and after much discussion during Akademy, we have aligned more properly on the way that we should work in light of the addition of the design system.

In our current process, we use GIT as the source for our icons. Anyone can download and apply the icons on their Plasma system. However, this process is not quite geared toward designers. After all, all icons located in the repo are exported icons. They are one-layer graphics that only function with node work. If a designer needed to work with these assets, they would have to likely recreate them to gain the appropriate shape control needed to make desired changes.

This leads to overhead work and style inconsistencies. Above all, it leads to a state where the real source of the icon doesn’t exist unless we dig through each individual computer where the icon was developed.

With the use of applications like PenPot or Figma, that question is resolved. Users are able to download an asset library owned by the design team at Plasma. The source is protected but it’s also distributed in away that doesn’t affect the master copies. If changes are needed, change requests can be submitted to master and the design team can decide to apply those changes or not.

Effectively, this means a change in the way that icons are stored. Moving the work from Git to PenPot/Figma seems like the best choice.

This requires communication, habit changes, risk management, etc. While I am speaking of this right now, we are “not” changing our current process to obtain Breeze icons from its repo. However, it means more information will come in the future as we develop a more effective way to work with a design system.

I am so excited to see the progress done in Union, and even more excited to start passing on design system components into Union to see how they fare against the newly created engine. Union is also under heavy development. I encourage you to watch Arjen Hiemstra’s presentation at Akademy when it’s published.

When this happens, this would be the second set of graphical controls that are executed via Union. I am sure many challenges lay ahead but I feel energized by it. I am sure we are on our way to resolving long-standing design and development issues that have slowed us down.

As a result of this year’s Akademy, I created a set of action items for myself that I have to review to be able to continue. One major item for me is to develop our master component source in PenPot. Even though Ocean icons are not 100% executable in PenPot, other assets like buttons, sliders, progress bars, inputs, etc are executable. I will dedicate the time to create these items and leave Figma for components behind, shedding also any legacy branding coming from the design system sources and only focusing on what we need for Ocean styles.

With that, Akademy has been a thrill. I go home energized and happy for what we have accomplished. All this while keeping a vibrant community and a vibrant free desktop system for all Linux users.