the kde-artists.org forum is also going gangbusters. we're working on various elements, including the new extenders. here's one artist's rendition:
we're not spending time on colour choices and what not at this point, but rather general design and interaction. in one such discussion it occurred to me that what we are doing, really, is industrial design even if we haven't said so explicity. form follows fuction, but it has to look sexy too; so we put graphic designers together with technicians and usability folk to achieve that goal. it was one of those "obvious!" forehead slapping moments, really, but now i have way to clearly describe what the heck it is we're trying to do here with Plasma =)
and i must say that it's really nice to be designing these elements with artists prior to actually coding things up. with the back and forth interaction, it's helping me visualize what we'll be aiming for and what the requirements in the APIs will need to be. not only will Plasma look better for it, but the code will be better too.
i heartily recommend this process to anybody who is doing KDE development involving visual or highly interactive elements as a key component.
3 comments:
I like it. And not only the "extenders"-feature (which -is- very cool), but also the approach of "first things first". Till now, a lot of development was done without mockups like these, resulting in limiting the features to the level of skills of the developer. By visually designing plasma, the only limit is our imagination. And that is what plasma makes it so sexy: make our dreams come true.
And another thing: The above animation could be seen as a visual use-case, adding the aspect of "how is it going to look like". Maybe this type of mockups should be made more.
I still like it very much. ;-)
Love the mockup! That shading of the detached extender object could also be a fading/opaqueness, or whatever type of effect we coudl want. Truely amazing stuff we have here. ;)
WOW !
It's damn cool to see my mockup at the top of your blog.
You made me realized there's alot of potential in opensource, and that dreamers DO have a place in it.
I'm glad my work is useful to you, and I'm grateful for knowing that.
It even conviced me to start my own blog. (erioll.blogspot.com). I'll post my mockups for Plasma withd etails, and news about an iconset I'm working on.
Greetings !
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