Get Involved/design

From KDE Community Wiki

About the Visual Design Group (VDG)

The Visual Design Group grew into a team dedicated to bettering the entire user experience, including human interface design, graphical design, user interface design and interaction design. The aim is to help KDE create software that is both beautiful and a pleasure to use.

The VDG welcomes people with skills in art, visual design, and human-computer interaction--or even just an interest in elegant design! If you have good ideas about how software should look and behave, you are a designer too, and we'd love for you to join in. Our group regularly interfaces with users, developers, and the Promo Team.

The VDG created and maintains the KDE Human Interface Guidelines and the Breeze theme used throughout KDE Plasma and applications.

First read through Get Involved/Design/Lessons Learned. This page contains often-talked design ideas and how the VDG understands them. This page can give context to some of the discussions happening in our live channels.

Recent Changes

Our team is currently working on a couple of changes. First, we are moving design discussions into Gitlab (link below). Our work of merging changes and discussing visual design changes is now moving to the same location. To get started with a new discussion, use the link below and create a new issue.

The second change is with our default visual style called Breeze. If you would like to submit mockups for our consideration, use the new Breeze SVG Kit link below to have the most updated graphics for your mockups. This helps our developers visualize your design ideas better.

Join the VDG!

Explore the links below and get started in open source design.

Communication Discussion Documentation
Matrix Channel Phabricator (for legacy discussions) Human Interface Guidelines
Telegram Channel Gitlab Issues (For current discussions) New Breeze SVG Kit - Figma
Mailing List

Note

VDG task and project-tracking is moving to GitLab. Click here to start a new discussion


Current Projects

Feel free to have a look at VDG's current projects, which are are listed on the Phabricator workboard. In addition, here are some timeless ways to get involved in ongoing work:


Communication and Workflow

Most VDG discussions start out informally. Once there is general agreement in the real-time chat, the discussion moves to a Gitlab task. Our goal is to open the discussion to include developers, and make the proposal more concrete using images and mockups.

Make sure to tag all the relevant participants in a Gitlab issue discussion. Summarize the discussion and initial VDG conclusion when writing the task's initial description. Include before/after images of the proposed change. Explain the benefits for the user and possible red flags.

In the Gitlab task, it's common for details and scope to change based on developer feedback. This is normal! Developers may have a better idea of what is technically possible or reasonable to change given our constraints. Listen to developer feedback and change your design accordingly. At the same time, encourage them to listen to your expertise, and provide good evidence of your decisions as varying views will challenge your proposal.

Once there's general agreement in the Gitlab task, work should begin and folks can start submitting patches!

Know Yourself

In a highly technical field like programming, it's easy to ecnounter the limits of your expertise. This is more difficult in subjective fields like art and design, and it's very important to have a firm grasp of what you can do. For example:

  • If you know you're not very artistically skilled, listen attentively to developers and experienced designers on what we look for.
  • Request honest feedback for your design proposals regarding what could be improved rather than blindly pushing on them.
  • If you want to learn more about human-computer interaction, offer to help in testing interactions and providing feedback.

VDG-related HowTos


Old Things