Get Involved/design/Breeze

Breeze as a Philosophy

Breeze is the central theme used by default in the Plasma Desktop. Breeze's main purpose is to instill a sense of wonder and optimism. Buttons, headers, checkboxes, colors, icons, and the rest were carefully selected and developed to make a vibrant desktop that people want to use.

Breeze, as a concept, started as far back as 2014 with past Visual Design members that integrated the work with KDE's developers. Icons showed a lot of what Breeze stands for. In their earlier iterations, Breeze icons presented rounded edges, squared icons with a small shadow to represent depth in the icon. Icon colors used a vibrant blue and green. White was used sparingly, instead a very light shade of gray was preferred. It signified modernity and sharpness in design.

The Breeze style joined the scene after the design team decided that the Oxygen style needed to evolve. These were the early years of mobile operating systems. Big players in the market influenced our perceptions of what was useful to users. At the same time, Linux was seeing deeper changes with other desktop environments like Gnome.

Our design team wanted to bring strong design principles to the user interface. KDE, like many Open Source projects, is managed through a decentralized contributing community spread through the world. It was clear to the team that we needed to work on aligning contributors to important principles that could help them create more effective applications. For this purpose, the team created Breeze with a series of ideas around color, shapes and interaction. The team put out a design toolkit so that designers could easily create mockups that used our approved assets to build applications. The team also provided sample applications built using the Breeze toolkit to demonstrate some of the ideas guiding Breeze and to also inspire developers.

A Sense of Futurism

Even though the team worked hard in developing Breeze, they wanted this theme to instill a sense of futurism in its users. For that reason, they spoke consistently of their desire to iterate and evolve Breeze overtime. Breeze should not be static, it is dynamic like the future. For that reason, Breeze is open to revisions and changes.

For this reason, the team is currently working in providing the next iteration of the Breeze theme to users. It is internally named Breeze Ocean. However, the naming is not definitive. This new evolution provides cleaner lines, softer blues, lighter shades and more room within the interface. This new Breeze style also introduces new controls, such as a brand new spinbox, switch toggles, cleaner dialogs, etc.

For a review on the graphical svg kit for this new style, please click here.

Designers and enthusiasts can use this developing graphical kit to mockup applications and submit graphical changes to our channels.

A Message to All

When designing applications, ask yourself, how can I make users get a sense of the future by using my application? Is there redundancy in my approach? Have all essential functions of the application been prioritized and given a prominent location? What elements in the UI can be powerful yet only shown when necessary?

We hope that as you interact with Breeze you feel a sense of peace. Breeze enables users to do productive work without getting in the way. Once the user sits at the desk to begin work, the user should feel at ease. Users should get a sense of the future and what it brings.