Creative direction of plasma

[Michael Rudolph]

Hello everyone,

some of you might have followed Riccardo's discussion with Aaron the 
other day. It was about some issues with plasma themeing and how these 
could be resolved. The consensus seemed to be, that plasma needs more 
creative direction; it was even talked about a creative director. Well, 
I hope we don't need a creative director. I hope, we all can give 
creative direction to plasma. There are two reasons, that together make 
me hope that.

First: everyone, who's involved with plasma needs to understand what 
plasma is about. It's definitely not just about not having icons on the 
desktop. Plasma is so much more. And everyone needs to understand that, 
no matter what aspect of plasma they are working on.
That's why I'm writing the plasma vision statement. It's an effort to 
spawn a common understanding of what the problems are, that we together 
try to solve with plasma. After all, KDE3 was a really good desktop 
environment, so why are we all doing this, anyway?

And secondly, it is my believe, that the number one sign of a great user 
interface is, that the innocent user will not even realize there is an 
interface.
After this really easy (or was it extremely hard?) design principle is 
understood, everybody in our community of creative directors should be 
able to give constructive criticism, as to whether a new feature, 
artwork or otherwise, is too intrusive and tries to push itself past a 
user's content (which is the only thing, that should stand out on the 
desktop).

Of course this meta discussion is rather useful. No, wait: rather 
useless :-) And the plasma community has proven itself to be rather 
immune to this kind of talk, so I will try to come up with some more 
concrete examples that can be discussed during the next couple of days. 
Probably as part of the discussion of scenarios that I promissed 
earlier. Also, nuno said he would like to bring some mockups to the 
table. Exiting times lie ahead.

michael