So... Koko needed a new icon.
Koko is KDE's image viewer, sharing its name with the rather famous gorilla, and yes, putting a gorilla in the icon would have made perfect sense... but we all love cats, and so did KOKO, so here we are 😀
And while making this ridiculously cute thing I kept thinking about something that has been bothering me more and more. Hopefully the cuteness of the cat will alleviate the ranty nature of what follows 🙂
Why is so much of what we design today so f...... boring?
We have incredible displays, GPUs doing absurd things, animation engines, shaders, QML, tools I could only dream about 20 years ago... and somehow so much of what we make with all of that looks like the same five rectangles arranged in slightly different ways.
Clean. and forgettable, austere but not in a brutalist way, its.... just booooring .
I've spent quite a bit of time recently bringing bits of old Oxygen back to life, and I know there is a temptation to read that as nostalgia, as if my answer is “look, things were better when we had shiny icons!”
It isn't.
I don't want the future to look like 2008.
In fact I think this sudden fascination with old interfaces, skeuomorphism, Winamp skins, old games, old icons and all the rest is a symptom of something else. People are looking backwards because they miss design having a personality. They miss opening something and actually having a reaction to it.
And now we have AI.
And f'ing..... makes the whole thing even more urgent to me. AI is spectacularly good at producing things that look like things that already exist. And if our design ambition was already reduced to producing safe, familiar, derivative variations of whatever everyone else is doing or that we have done... congratulations, they have automated it,.... and and I can't feel much more from such things... other than plain sadness.
So I don't want us to go backwards. I want us to go somewhere.
Make something NEW!!!
Make something strange. Make something excessive. Make something beautiful, ugly, funny, annoying, charming, stupid, brilliant, probably all of those at once. Make something somebody will hate enough to write a 14 rant bolg post about.
Just please make us feel something.
see you soon in aKademy for more ranting and maybe a beer or 2
Also played with this for the plasma-studio app. I think i can do better
OOOOO and OBVIUSLY if you want our sort of Crazy JOIN us in Oxygen, or KDE or anything
just go do stuf NEW stuf!!!!!!
I’m so happy you said this and are taking a stand on the issue. I’m so happy to hear that you don’t want boring design and it makes me feel excited to see what you come up with next.
I feel like around 2000 design was exciting around computers, but then it went all sterile and lifeless. Nothing unique, don’t become passionate. Accept your square logo because it’s professional.
BTW, I really like this icon. It would make me want to use Koko if I hadn’t.
I appreciate the sentiment, and I actually very much like the Plasma Studio icon. It could use a bit more … something… but as it is – it is still interesting.
Yes, the idea is sound. I tried to do it in the same way as the original, with 3 additive swirling lines that would generate the RGB out of the CMY, but it looked meh. Partly because each single line would have to be quite large to overlap the previous one in order to achieve the effect…
Yeah I agree. Like I turned on the big ole Oxygen startup sound of out of nostalgia for sure. Remember what a thrill it was to have working sound on Linux. 😆
But also I just want my computer to take some seconds to say hello when it logs in. It’s whimsy even without thinking about the 00s.
See you at Akademy!
Heheh right…
I find nostalgia fine, at least it’s something… I would wish we collectively be able to produce a something new experience…
A human touch at every interaction at every frame the user gets exposed to…. It’s specially important at this new age of mindless derivative AI slop…
It’s great that you and others are putting in the work to fix and develop Oxygen. I agree that everything has remained boring despite what were capable of nowadays, as if all ui stagnated (not quite but essentially) after 2013 when iOS 7 came out. Projects like these and growing irritation with the current sameness are a foot in the right direction into bringing back personality into mundaneness.
Correction: Gwenview is KDE’s image viewer and will remain so as long as the users have anything to say about it.
I know *some people* are attempting to push Koko as Gwenview’s replacement, but it’s grossly inadequate to the task.
you are right i should have said koko is a KDE image viewer. IM just here to make the icons 😀