So... a bit of news. 🙂

KDAB have just published a video featuring me talking about design, QML, and something I keep coming back to: what happens when the tools we use to make software become more capable, while the interfaces we build with them seem to get increasingly predictable?

This started with me playing around with QML, trying to see how far I could push some ideas about the look and behaviour of an interface.

Things that are perhaps a little excessive, things that might be annoying in everyday use, things that are difficult to justify in a design review.
The sort of things you might want to try before somebody with more of a brain than you explains why you shouldn't. 🙂

And its something I have been thinking about for some time, the place we leave for this kind of work, particularly in open source.

OSS has a rather unusual relationship with creativity. We can inspect how things work, modify them, share our experiments, and build on each other's work.
There is room for someone to follow an idea simply because it interests them, it does not require a market research, there is no need to demonstrate that it will appeal to the largest possible audience before writing the first line of code or in my case drawing the first squigly line in inkscape.

And yet, sometimes our projects can be surprisingly cautious about appearance.
We globaly spend a great deal of effort making software coherent and predictable, which is understandable and a good thing when you have to maintain it for years and support a wide range of users.
But those concerns can also make it difficult to explore alternatives. The existing conventions gradually become the boundaries of what we consider reasonable.
Trust me I was that guy shooting down what I believed were bad ideas. because of all the work that it would create, or because it was just 2 insane etc....

BUT

Now as a designer, I find that a little frustrating. Especially when the technology itself offers so many possibilities. I don't expect every application to become an animated art installation, and I certainly don't want every interaction to demand my attention (expect the ones I create ;)) . But I'd like to see more people curious about what an interface could be, rather than starting from what an interface is supposed to look like.

Which brings me to OxygenLabs.

We started a new repository under KDE in the playground area, intended as a space for exploring visual ideas and seeing where they lead.

https://invent.kde.org/libraries/oxygen-labs.git

What interests us is the willingness to put care into visual details, to explore a particular character or mood, and to take the appearance of software seriously enough to question the usual answers.

We would like OxygenLabs to give that process somewhere to happen. Not every piece of work needs to arrive as a finished feature, actually the opposite and not every experiment needs to graduate into a product. Sometimes it is useful just to make something, live with it for a while, and find out what you learn from the experience.

For now it just has 2 things I was playing with, one of them a request people have for a long time to be able on only use colourful icons . on the plasma panel via giving the icons KCM area a specific configure option per theme...

Anyway, that's the thinking behind it. The video goes into some of the questions that led me here, and OxygenLabs is a small, practical way of exploring them.

Have a look at both, and let me know what you think. I'm curious to see what comes out of this. 🙂

P.S. we also have a "new" site https://oxygen-design.org/