Plasma Mobile Components -> Kirigami (?)

Thomas Pfeiffer thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org
Tue Feb 23 11:51:12 UTC 2016


Dear fellow Plasma team members,
about two weeks ago, Marco came to the VDG asking for a new name for Plasma 
Mobile Components. 
The reasoning behind this request was that with them becoming their own KDE 
framework and Subsurface mobile showing that they work very well outside of 
Plasma Mobile as well, we don't want people to associate them strongly with 
Plasma Mobile (as Martin Gräßlin had pointed out).

With that request, we started brainstorming. What we wanted the name to 
express was
- Physicality (because it does have some similarities to Material Design, 
while still being quite different in some areas)
- A tool for expressing your creativity in UI design
- Moving layers of things (because of the central role of drawers)

We had ideas like "slide", "paper" or "blocks" flying around, but then Alex 
Longo came up with Origami, which in turn led him to "Kirigami".
For those of you who (like the rest of the brainstorming team) don't know what 
Kirigami is: It's a technique similar to Origami, which adds cutting to 
folding.

It is physical, it is creative, kinda playful without being childish, and it's 
far less common than Origami, which helps with searchability.

Now you might think "Won't people make fun of the name because it has a K in 
it?". They might, but the cool thing is: Whenever someone does, all we need to 
reply with is " http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Kirigami " and they'll feel like the lazy 
dumbos that they are. 
We could even play with it immediately when announcing the name, saying 
something like "You all know how much we love names with a K, but this time, 
instead of just randomly replacing Cs with Ks, we found a name that comes with 
a built-in K (thank you, Japanese)!"

Like Material Design, Kirigami would be more than just a set of UI components, 
it comes with its own design philosophy documented in the HIG.

Since it would in the future encompass not only mobile, but - following the 
convergence paradigm - QtQuick-based desktop applications as well, we want all 
of the team to be on board with the name. 
So, does anybody see potential pitfalls or other problems with the name? If 
so, speak up!

Cheers,
Thomas


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