After two tremendously fun livestreams the Plasma 5.24 wallpaper is all wrapped up. With this particular image we had a lot of fun using new techniques to create this wallpaper, and the entire process was a fun adventure. To download the wallpaper it’s available on OpenDesktop and GetHowNewStuff if you’re a Plasma user.
The wallpaper was first sketched in the Krita painting application. Up until this point wallpapers I authored used a fairly inflexible technique of creating a polygon grid and manipulating it, but this new shape would require new techniques.
In Inkscape a wireframe was drawn using the line tool. This was done by drawing curved lines roughly matched over the sketch, applying successive wireframes one over another until we could rely on the snapping tools in Inkscape to place polygons.
This ultimately resulted in 2,221 hand-drawn polygons, layered in a way similar to reptile scales so gaps would not show through once fills were applied. People often question if these are done in Blender, but Inkscape is actually the software of the day with this being done entirely in 2D.
Fills were applied as linear gradients to the grouped polygons. At this point edges were also drawn in and I was getting ready to use the “Jitter Gradients” plugin I developed some years ago for the purpose of differentiating the individual polygons, but alas it wasn’t compatible with modern Inkscape! AAAAGH!
While I was busy having a panic attack live on-air Niccolò Veggero swept in and graciously updated the script to be compatible while I worked in other areas. What a lifesaver! With the Jitter Gradients plugin fixed up work began hopping between Krita and Inkscape, colours starting roughly landing, and we quickly approached the end of the wallpaper work.
Layers layers layers ahoy! This was the state of the wallpaper at the end of the second livestream. While almost everything was in place, in practise it’s never a bad idea to walk away for a few hours to come back later with clear eyes.
After coming back to the image several adjustments were made. A lot of the work I had done in Krita during the livestream was replaced, mostly because I realized I didn’t do the work in 8K, which we offer now. There was also a few steps in GIMP such as noise and some minor light-curve editing.
And so ended the work on the Plasma 5.24 wallpaper! After taking it up with the chat on the livestream it was quickly decided to be named “Wavy McWallpaperface”. The last steps are pretty standard; we run it through our cropping and sizing script which produces the highest quality versions for a variety of resolutions. If you noticed that the base image is slightly taller than “standard” it’s because it was, to accommodate cropping so it’s not just removing content for taller aspect ratios. The cropping script was also adjusted slightly for this wallpaper so it wouldn’t crop the top, which is the more interesting bit.
Update: The Livestream is moved to Monday January 10th, sorry for the inconvenience it may cause.
After a very successful livestream at the beginning of the week (with a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who popped in) it’s time to hunker down for one more afternoon to finish what we started! This Sunday (January 9th) I’ll once again be hosting a stream, where we’ll finish the wallpaper together. All the tedious manual work is well behind us, so this round should be mostly finery and polish in addition to the background, which is all fun and creative stuff. Click here for the Youtube link to the upcoming stream if you want to set a reminder for yourself. The livestream will run at least 2 hours, but if we’re all having fun I’ll run it for an additional 2 after a brief intermission.
For everyone who didn’t have a chance to attend, in the last livestream we started with the above sketch done in Krita and experimented with a new method on-the-fly where we leaned into Inkscapes snapping features to create a 3D mesh by hand, with the plan to use the built-in “Restacking” tool to enable hand-drawn polygons with “perfect” edges. While the mesh method was a rousing success and testing the restack feature gave ideal results, near the end of the stream it was realized that watching me draw triangles for several hours was not a hip idea, so I decided to take the remainder of the more tedious work offline.
Which was a good thing, because I had to throw away hours worth of hand-drawn polygons. I was not a happy camper. There was a damper in the pamper. It was a stylistic cramper. Simply put I literally zigged when I should have zagged and half the polygons were misaligned because of it.
Not to worry though, because I had the chance to experiment a bit more with less certain ideas and while I’m still playing a bit, I’m even happier with the redone results. Almost like I had roughly 5 hours of practice…
In terms of livestreaming itself it went off without a hitch on a technical level, but the overall quality was pretty awful. I’m sorry for that, I didn’t realize how bad it was. I’ve been making improvements so the quality of future streams will be far better. Earnestly I wasn’t sure if I’d be doing it again so I didn’t put an overwhelming amount of effort into the initial setup. I fully expected to have large swaths of time without anyone watching, but while the quality of the feed was borderline unwatchable I saw far more activity than I anticipated, and the chat was more than excellent in making me want to continue doing streams. You all rock!
There’s still testing and adjustments to be made but it’ll definitely have much higher video quality this upcoming stream, hopefully have better audio quality, and there’s a 50/50 chance I’ll broadcast in (up to) 4K (if the latency is acceptable). I didn’t have hardware encoding set up, I think it’ll be waaaaay nicer for me not to be encoding 4K to 1080p video on my CPU while using a CPU-intensive drawing application. It’s almost like my video card is meant for video. Additionally, and while I make no guarantees, I’ll also be attempting to hook up screen mirroring with my Android drawing tablet so I can use both it and my desktop computer to complete the wallpaper using all the tools at my disposal on-air. While the mixing of vector and traditional art was debated in an older wallpaper, I’ll have you – yes, you! – to give live feedback.
Once again I want to thank everyone who made it (or wanted to make it) to the previous stream. It was a delightful experience and I hope to see you this Sunday!
Hullo! On Monday January 3rd 5:00pm GMT (12:00pm EST) I’m going to try livestreaming work on a potential Plasma wallpaper, possibly some icon work, and other potential tangential work. I’ll also be answering questions, giving advice and tips for software like Krita and Inkscape, and if there’s time I may also show some terrible unreleased design work from the bowels of my storage drive. The stream will be of indeterminate length; at least a couple hours but it might run long.
The stream will be on Youtube for sure, please comment requesting another video service (click here) if Youtube/Google skeeves interested people out (assuming I can get them to work); here’s the Youtube link for those who may want to set a reminder.
Some new CSS classes are coming to icons courtesy Janet Blackquill, and I’m excited to cover what exactly this will let icon artists do in 2022! This post is part tutorial and part news. For those looking for a quick TLDR; icons are going to get even better. I’m also going to clear up some inaccuracies in existing documentation (which I plan on updating at some point later)
CSS?
For those unfamiliar, vector icons in KDE can have a stylesheet which embeds several useful colours which update along with the system palette. If you want to make icons that adapt in some way you use the colours in these sheets. If you open an SVG icon from Breeze in a standard text editor you might come across something vaguely like this:
Note that the <style> tag has an id of “current-color-scheme”. This is how we identify which <style> tag contains our adaptive colours.
When using Inkscape you can use the “Selectors and CSS” dialog available under the Object menu to see these special styles:
When you have a something selected you can set the fill or stroke to “currentColor” and use the “+” button to add a CSS class. Things that apply to the selected element are on the left, and a list of all classes found in the image are on the right. Here’s the important part: the classes in this list are a lie! First and foremost, some icons have extra CSS classes listed that don’t actually work when used as an icon, and of course, some new ones are missing. You can’t “preview” how an icon will look with Inkscape alone, so to see what actually works there’s applications like Cuttlefish or Ikona which can provide an accurate view of your work. In terms of quickly making sure you have the correct palette in an icon, I recommend using a text editor and replacing the style with the “id” of “current-color-scheme” with the style below:
You may notice several colours are very different. Let’s start with what’s missing; ColorScheme-ViewText, ColorScheme-ViewBackground, ColorScheme-ViewHover, ColorScheme-ViewFocus, ColorScheme-ButtonText, ColorScheme-ButtonBackground, and ColorScheme-ButtonHover are gone. I don’t know much about why these are used as often as they are, if they ever worked, or what, but they’re no longer active and when I was double checking to ensure I don’t feed anyone misinformation I found some bugs where they were meant to be used but… don’t work. So, for now, we’ll ignore what doesn’t actually exist.
In terms of what does exist, here’s a list of the available colours from the above style code and what you can expect behaviourally, along with my own observations:
ColorScheme-Text; it’s the same colour as text on a standard window. This usually means it’s near-white or near-black, but expect some colour schemes to add some saturation, such as a red theme making text pink. The opposing colour to Text is Background. For modern use it’s a good contrast colour, and works really well for monochrome icons paired with text.
ColorScheme-Background; Same as the background colour of a standard window. Background has fewer use-cases, and generally it’s recommended you use transparency instead of this.
ColorScheme-Highlight; This was the first method of using the increasingly popular accent colour in icons, but colour schemes generally mix the accent colour with the background colour dulling the result to a degree. If you want the exact accent colour read on to ActiveText. Highlight is still great when you want to use the accent colour but you don’t want it to be overly strong.
ColorScheme-PositiveText/ColorScheme-NeutralText/ColorScheme-NegativeText; Generally these are green, orange, and red respectively. Some schemes do change these a bit so if you want “guaranteed” colours such as green, these are not appropriate. Instead use them as their labels imply, as positive to negatively associated colours. These are used often in monochrome icons. If working on full-colour icons and you’re representing a common system component or generic things these can be used as well for light flavour, such as debris in a trash can, but it’s recommended use be kept to a minimum.
ColorScheme-ActiveText; this is one of the 3 newly added colours to icons, and is the new recommended way of using accent colours in icons if you want the exact colour. Unlike Highlight, ActiveText is an unmodified accent colour directly set by the user. It can be just about anything from sky blue to hot pink to grey.
ColorScheme-Complement and ColorScheme-Contrast; These are the other two new colours, and are a little bit special. Unlike every other colour set by the scheme, Complement and Contrast are guaranteed to be pure black or pure white. If the colour scheme is dark Compliment will be black and Contrast will be white, and if the scheme is light Compliment will be white and Contrast will be black. There are several use-cases for these, mainly for allowing icons to re-shade themselves for light/dark environments, or for providing outlines. Often icon artists relied on Text and Background for “shading”, but with schemes like Quartz or Afterglow you’d see situations where icons would be “stained” in unwanted ways. Now we have a much more reliable pair of values which won’t create muddy results.
How We’ll Use These New Classes
The new colours added a few possibilities. ColorScheme-ActiveText is pretty straightforward, giving us the user-defined accent. If you have an icon theme and are using accent colours via Highlight, ActiveText will get you the more vibrant and untarnished accent colour. Beyond that Compliment and Contrast are pulling a few duties in the upcoming icon refresh, so I’ll cover them in more detail.
First we’re using ColorScheme-Contrast for bottom shadows/highlights. In dark mode it gives icons a soft under-light, and light mode it’s a standard shadow. Previously we used Text for this, and it worked, but Contrast is just better for this now. Where it’s really nice is helping define the silhouette of the icon.
For folders we’re mixing in a very small amount of Contrast over top the accent colour for just a very tiny amount of “pop” without being obnoxious about it. This also helps guarantee a minimal amount of contrast between the accent colour and the background.
We’re using ColorScheme-Compliment for decals and overlays. We get nice dark-on-dark or light-on-light designs, but we don’t suffer from decals looking “muddy” anymore as we used the Background colour where we now use Compliment.
For comparison here’s the same folder using the new CSS under previously unfavourable circumstances with a red-on-red-on-red scheme, the folder on the left using previously available colours and the folder on the right using the three new colours. Before the new colours I was ready to chalk it up to “don’t use terrible themes” but now everyone can safely use the very worst colour schemes on the planet and still have usable and attractive icons.
Beyond the new colours, work is continuing on the refreshed icons. There’s been a great deal of feedback and many icons are being fine-tuned. The pipeline tools are evolving as well, having had a significant refactor which greatly improved the tool all-around.
Over the month of November work has been started to refresh the full-colour icons in Breeze as an extension of the “Blue Ocean” initiative. With literally hundreds of hand-created vector icons in our roster we’ve had to develop new processes and are working on a more robust pipeline so this refresh can be done in a somewhat timely manner.
Preview of the new folders. Subject to change and refinement.
As was the method for Blue Ocean on the desktop widgets and design, the icons will be a gradual rollout over a few releases. We do have a strategy in place to ensure that this won’t be too jarring or inconsistent during the transition. The current plan is to update both all mimetypes and all places in time for the 5.24 release.
Like our current icons the new icons have adaptive capabilities. Beyond that some additional select icons such as the new desktop icon are also adaptive, and there are plans for other icons to also take advantage of this feature where it would not be obnoxious. Compared to existing icons the refreshed content will be softer, more detailed, and less flat. These icons are also prepared with future capabilities in mind, and as enhancements are made to KDE Frameworks these icons may expose new and interesting features.
Finally, we’re expanding the number of sizes the icons come in, so they look ideal at more zoom levels in your file browser. Currently colour places icons are offered in 32, 48, 64, and 96 pixel sizes, and mimetypes are offered in 32 and 64 pixel sizes. Refreshed icons in both places and mimetypes will be offered in 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, and 256 pixel sizes with no missing graphics. We already have all folders in all of the above sizes, and in under a month while also writing our software we have over doubled the number of folder icons in Breeze. We’re estimating we will more than triple in the number of mimetype icons.
To get this work done we’ve built new tools for the express purpose of making mass iconography far easier for even individual artists, so I’m very pleased to state that a new icon and SVG pipeline is underway and despite being unfinished is producing results. This Python-written pipeline is capable of adding guides, rulers, and setting up grids for existing icons, standardizing existing icon colours, assembling entirely new icons from templates and components, and aggressively optimizing icons. With this authors will be able to have a “golden copy” of their icon sets where they can focus purely on design, letting the software take care of cleaning up the documents and assembling the individual pieces. The folders in the above image were assembled by the pipeline, with no hand-tuning.
In terms of optimization some extreme cases have seen unoptimized Oxygen icons drop 75% or their filesize. In less ideal situations a few simple hand-optimized test icons I produced run through the pipeline saw 10-20% reductions in filesize. The new optimizer is not built on any existing tools, and is an entirely new thing. At similar settings the new optimizer is on par or slightly ahead of Inkscape in most tests, but at the same time it’s also more specialized and the output cannot be edited when certain stages are enabled. It’s also targeted towards TinySVG and should not be expected to work on full-fat images (though, accommodations have been made). There is still work to be done too, and in the future more optimization steps are on the table to further reduce output size.
Not only is this pipeline beneficial to KDE artists, but history has proven even the roughest artistic tools we produce are regularly used outside of Plasma development. With this in mind we plan to release our new tooling separate from Breeze as its own package/download after polishing it to a mirror shine. Currently nicknamed “Iconoclast”, we are specifically setting out for this tooling to be useful and ready for the wider community beyond KDE.
Iconoclast will include our new pipeline, a manual, tips and advice, and another entirely new icon set named “Bones”, which is already in progress. The pipeline itself is strongly configurable with ini files, so KDE-isms can be removed and it can be adapted to work for icons sets that may have different flows through configuration. The Bones icon set will be a minimal base which can either be built on top of, or used as a reference, and these icons will released in the public domain. Different projects with different licenses can just take it and use it, and it’s uses generic technologies not tied to KDE. The pipeline itself will be GPL, and I don’t have a specific timeline for when the kit will be released but once it’s solidified I’ll make an announcement; though it’s likely to be after the new year.
The newest addition is the Glyph library used on this site. It features hundreds of original icons in a convenient font-based format.
Work on the glyphs is ongoing, and I expect there to be some upheaval in the near future as the generator is upgraded. If you don’t mind that though or just want to peruse, check em’ out!
Today I streamed the first half of the Plasma 5.11 wallpaper production, and it was an interesting experience. The video above is the abridged version sped up ~20x, heavily edited to the actual creation, and should be a fun watch for the interested.
It looks like there’s another full work-day that needs to go into the wallpaper still, and while I think I’ll also record the second half I don’t think I’ll livestream it; while I’m very appreciative of the viewers I had, it was quite a bit of extra work and quite difficult to carry on a one-man conversation for 8 hours, while working, for at most a few people. Like I said, I will still record the second half of the wallpaper for posterity, I simply don’t think I’ll be streaming it. I do think I’ll keep streaming the odd icon batch, as those are about as long as I want, so they can be kept to a digestible hour.
The wallpaper as it is is based on an image of a reef along with a recent trip to the beach during the Blue Systems sprint. There’s still a long way to go, and I can easily see another 8 hours going into this before it’s completed; there’s water effects, tides, doing the rocks, and taking a second pass at the foam – among other things – especially before I hit the level of KDE polish I’d like meet.
Looking at it, I may also make a reversed image with only the shoreline components for dual-screen aficionados.
Within the next week or so I’ll post the next timelapse after I complete the wallpaper. 😀
It’s getting to be that time of the release cycle where I’ll be making a new wallpaper for the next Plasma release. For the 5.11 cycle I’ll be doing things a bit differently owing to a request on Reddit several weeks back; this wallpaper is going to be done over a livestream!
The wallpaper livestream will be on Saturday the 20th, and start ~10:00am Eastern Daylight time, or 2:00pm GMT. I’m going to estimate the stream to last ~8-10 hours, with a couple short breaks somewhere in the middle.
The aim will be to get the majority of the wallpaper done during the stream (they take that long!), with anything done beyond the stream falling into tweaks and correction territory. There’s also the chance you may see a few attempts until I settle, as I have a few designs in mind and there may be some experimentation there along with some spectacular failures along the road.
I’ll keep a chat open, and I’ll field any questions I get, but beyond that I figure it will be the kind of stream people might like as background noise. I also suspect it might be the kind of thing people will want to minimize now and again – I think it will be a passive viewing experience. When the livestream is over I’ll go back and create a sped-up version which I’ll post on YouTube.
Which brings me to an important question I have for everyone who does or is into livestreams; I’ve never streamed before! I know about Twitch and YouTube, even Hangouts, and have heard about OBS; are there any recommendations for which streaming service/software I should broadcast with? Comment here (or on Reddit, I’ll be posting there) with input as to the best way to stream a fairly long art session. Also, I’m considering using a webcam as well – please let me know if that’s of interest, and if there’s software for a total rookie to do it. I’ll post the info on where I’ll be streaming once I figure out where it will be.
Lastly, if the stream is fairly successful at least on a technical level, I’ll look into shorter episodes featuring Aether icon development which would probably see rounds of 3-4 icons being completed in the space of a shorter session.
Earlier this week the decision was made to switch from Drupal to WordPress as the CMS used for the KDE.org main website. While Drupal is certainly a fine system, the decision to switch was borne when my quick work to update a WordPress asset turned into a serious venture much more successful than my work with Drupal. Prior to my contributing to KDE I used to develop on WP, and I was surprised to find out my experience largely held in this new version. In hindsight, WordPress was the obvious option considering this.
A round of discussion about formally switching ensued, and many other great reasons to use WordPress were present, including the much larger number of KDE websites on the platform. I won’t get into it too much as I’d instead like to go over the work done over the past week and some of the features coming to KDE.org Aether template which are already complete; today I’ll focus on the header, which had the most love.
The header will feature an up to 3-level menu, and in the future it may be made to not restrict the number of levels. But, for now, 3. It nicely scales back to two or one levels as appropriate. Currently the theme will pull featured images from root navigation elements and display them in the dropdown, but in the future this will likely become a navigation-specific setting for more control. As expected, the navigation is completely customizable. It is also responsive, and when it can no longer accommodate the number of menu items for the width of the given screen it will switch into ‘hamburger mode’ which works very well on mobile.
My personal favorite feature so far is the live search. This probably had the most work this week, and I really wanted to nail it down well. It’s a search-as-you-type system, but has several built-in features to avoid overloading servers, such as an adaptive delay until it performs a request and temporary localstorage caching.
Lastly, the theme is being built to be completely customizable for suitability on not only KDE.org itself, but even as far down as personal blogs which may not demand the full range of features being built into the design.
The design itself is forked from KdeTheme theme, which in turn was forked from Activello. It features thoughtful localization, and work is being done to make the individual components more modular so maintenance will be a cinch over the long game. There are still many features, options, and utilities being poured into the design, and I’ll be posting updates semi-regularly as the progress continues.
Ultimately, the KDE.org theme itself will be generic enough for use on any KDE-related site. As it matures enough to be in use on regular websites, the design will also be loaded onto the WordPress theme directory, allowing sites which may not enjoy the full KDE infrastructure (such as personal developer blogs) to easily install and keep the theme updated.
If you maintain a KDE-related website and are using Drupal, depending on the breadth of your content, we still have options for you. If you have a smaller website, I’ll be offering to port to WordPress if you desire. If you have features required which can be folded into the larger theme I will do so as appropriate, otherwise we can evaluate if a small site-specific plugin could serve that use-case. If you have a Drupal site too large to move – or you simply wish to stick on Drupal – after the KDE.org wordpress work is considered complete, the existing Drupal 7 theme will be updated to service existing websites. For anyone else maintaining a website looking to use this design I’m also taking feature requests for the theme and design elements at this point. Please send inquiries and requests to the kde-www mailing list.
Beyond the design itself, we have some exciting plans for managing content and applications which I’ll be posting about later.
KDE.org quite possibly has one of the largest open-source websites compared to any other desktop-oriented project, extending beyond into applications, wikis, guides, and much more. The amount of content is dizzying and indeed a huge chunk of that content is about as old as the mascot Kandalf – figuratively and literally.
I personally believe he’s ripped under that cloak.
The KDE.org user-facing design “Aether” is live and various kinks have been worked out, but one fact is glaringly obvious; we’ve made the layers of age and look better by adding another layer. Ultimately the real fix is migrating the site to Drupal, so I figured this post would cover some of the thoughts and progress behind the ongoing work.
Right now work is on porting the Aether theme to Drupal 8, ideally it’ll be “better than perfect port” with Drupal optimizations, making better use of Bootstrap 4, and refinements. Additionally, I’m preparing a “Neverland-style” template for those planning to use Aether on their KDE-related project sites, but it’s more of a side-project until the Drupal theme lands. Recently the theme was changed to use Bootsraps’ Barrio base theme, which has been a very pleasant decision as we get much more “out of the box”. It does require a Bootstrap library module which will allow local or CDN-based Bootstrap installations, and while at first I was asking “why can’t a theme just be self-contained?”, now I’m understanding the logic – Bootstrap is popular, multiple themes use it, this will keep it all up-to-date and can be updated itself. I do think maybe one thing Drupal should do is have some rudimentary package management that says “hey, we also need to download this”, but it’s easy enough to install separately.
If you have a project website looking to port to Aether, I would first advise you simply waiting until you can consider moving your page to the main Drupal installation when it eventually goes live; in my perfect world I imagine Drupal unifying a great amount of disparate content, thus getting free updates. Additionally, consider hitting up the KDE-www mailing list and ask to help out on content, or place feature requests for front-end UI elements. While I’m currently lurking the mailing list, I’ll try to provide whatever info I can. On an aside, I had some Telegram confusion with some people looking to contribute and concerns from administrators, so please simply defer to the mailing list.
In terms of the Aether theme, I will be posting the basic theme on our git repo; when it goes up if you have Bootstrap and Twig experience (any at all is more than I had when I started), please consider contributing, especially if you maintain a page and would migrate to Drupal if it had the appropriate featureset. I will post a tiny follow-up when the repo is up.
