The VDG new additions and a complete roster

In which we talk about the new members, the layout of the group and the community as well as plug the forums a tad more :)

"Growth" Creative Commons CC-SA

So a few weeks ago we had the pleasure of growing with one member and yesterday we grew even more. With yesterdays addition I though a new complete roster of members would be in place and just a quick walkthrough of what everyone does starting with the two new members.

Andrew Lake is a designer and engineer from Seattle who previously worked on the media player Bangarang. He has an insane energy and is a machine gun for new ideas and concepts. He is currently focusing all his attention on the coming Plasma Theme but in the coming months this will most probably spill out into desktop layout ideas, window decorations and the coming widget theme.

Uri Herrera is a designer from Mexico who's icon themes (Nitrux, Compass and Flattr) are already well know. He currently works on the coming Nitrux hardware and software sollution (coming this spring) as well as collaborating on the new Numix desktop. So wherever you are in Linux you will run into him. For us his main work will be to collaborate tightly with Acidrum on the coming Plasma Icon Theme making awesome even awesomemner (it's a word now).

Elena Ramirez is a talented and insanely driven designer and illustrator in Seville, Spain who works mostly on the web team. She is also an apt logo designer with a clear eye for layouts and forms.

David Brandl is our web-teammanager and a webdesigner from Austria who is quietly and solidly working away on the technical and design issues for the future of KDE and Plasma's internet presence.

Luisa Pires is a designer and branding specialist from Brazil - currently she is on the webteam but she will soon start working on logo's and press kit layout as new projects and technical ideas need good graphical representation and introductions.

Fabian Bornschein is the talented designer behind the Tilain Plasma Theme and an active participant in the Kubuntu G+ pages from Germany. He is currently working on the system tray icons (in tandem with Uri and Acidrum's icon work) and the future Plasma Theme.

Acidrum is the icon designer who's sketches we recently posted about. His work is the new icon theme - a work that is moving forward constantly with icons being added daily.

Cuan Knaggs is a South African designer and Branding specialist who is currently on the (perhaps misnamed) Webteam.

Mohammed Nafees is our tech guy. A student with a solid past in the KDE community who will in the future work on the technical sollutions and issues that will crop up during the design work. For now he is doing his finals (Go Mohammed! Ace those tests!) but when he comes back this is where his focus will be.

Nuno Pinheiro is the designer of the Oxygen theme and KDE's grand old man in design. He is our go-to-guy with strange questions concerning design and Qt and a solid shoulder to cry on when things get too hectic.

Me (Jens Reuterberg), I am an illustrator and graphics designer from Sweden who work as project lead for the VDG trying to make certain that all this talent above is used properly, seen properly and that the VDG and the design community in KDE will be a lasting thing.

...

Aside from us there are members who for various reasons get advisory roles more than active roles. Some balance between active and advisory some lay back for now giving technical and design suggestions and back-up later.

Marco Martin is a Plasma Developer from Italy who's work with the coming system tray has already been posted - he is wildly trying to get us all up to snuff on technical issues (good luck Marco ;) ) as well as being a design contributor in the group.

Ivan Čukić is a Plasma Developer from Belgrade who created the popular Lancelot launcher and is right now up to his neck in work on Plasma Next who is combining this with his work on a Activities Switcher and design contributions.

Malcer Quaid is the designer of the Caledonia theme who had to take a step back to advisor to put all his focus on the coming Chakra theme. 

Further advisers are present in the shape of the "Eye of Sauron" aka Sebastian Kügler from the Plasma Devs and Hans Chen a community admin.  

...

But Wait, There's More! There is the community to talk about! The idea behind the VDG community forums on the KDE-forums is to allow the community to take an active role in the design work with Plasma and other KDE projects. 
Here developers will ask for help, or you can post mockups and sketches and suggestions for new ideas on design in KDE.

I've said this before but it deserves repeating. We read every... single... post. Even if you think "maybe this idea isn't that great" post it! Sketch it up (and you don't have to be DaVinci just draw a few boxes on a piece of paper and take a photo of it to better show of your idea). If you see a project that needs help - help them.

There are rules though: contributions always trump criticism. A contribution doesn't have to be perfect - criticism does. I want to have that said so no one thinks that it's a free for all - we follow art school /design school guidelines here and you will do well reading up them. Lets make it a positive space where everyone feel welcome to post contributions and idea and where we can foster a good sense of criticism where it assists instead of tears down!

The more people we are helping out the better the end result will be!

Monday Report #4

In which we talk about being sick, organization, the value of it, the point of workflow. A quick recap of the release plans and how it will work. We touch on the subject of icons and the coming icons for Plasma and about shapes then round up about what's coming.

Sadly the fever wasn't just saturday but at least I stayed alive.

I recently had a touch of the flu. Actually I had a massive punch in the face of the flu resulting in fever, chills, cramps of various assortments and headaches. Four four or five days I wasn't able to raise a finger in the direction of work which kinda scared me.
It shouldn't have - I saw a thread go on without me, design work being done without me and designers trooping on without me. Now part of me is of course upset because we all like to feel as if the world would crumble without us - but a massive bit of me is happy as nothing else.

...

The idea with the VDG, with the Community Design of KDE, is not to implement MY ideas on Plasma Next, it's not even only about great design for Plasma Next - it is to create a workflow fitting community design in KDE now and in the future that isn't hinging on any one individuals permanent presence. Something lasting and relevant.

What's needed is to hammer this out - to make it even sleeker. Create a situation where one of us can just disappear for weeks without an issue. So obviously we are getting there bit by bit. Plenty of work to be done - but the ship has started to move in the right direction.

...

Talking of "Bit by Bit" I can only assume that you've read Sebas blog post on the subject of the coming release of Plasma and the pace we're doing this in? Slowly and bit-by-bit. Now KDE projects have done this before and it was decided early on that this was the method preferred which both suits us in the VDG as much as it raises and issue.
Bit-by-bit is great for the user, the developers and the designers. Everyone have time to try the new thing, nothing comes as a massive shock and with a little back-and-forth changes can be made, issues tried out and we can actually both play around a little and have to time get it right and solid.

It's not so good for marketing though. Everyone loves a big splash. So trying to keep the changes visible for everyone through the press will be a challenge. But, its worth it in the long run.

...

Finally - Icons. Now we've talked about colors and theme's earlier and so far the idea of it is to create something futuristic, yet human. Science-fiction but hopeful. We've seen moodboards and color charts trying to tie into that theme and mood - exploring it and giving it form, drip by drip. Now we're going to bypass the third stage completely and go for icons delving deeper into shapes and forms in the next Monday report but as a short description - we want flat sharp angles mixed and weighed with rounded corners, "chunky"shapes and solid comforting fields of color.

Icon theme's are a huge undertaking - thousands and thousands of tiny images that has to be made well weighed up, they have to be visible in several sizes and they need to all stick to a visual goal. They will NOT be done in time for the first freeze in March, that can be said with absolute certainty and they will too be released bit-by-bit with large sections of the current icon theme replaced one by one.
Acidrum is right now sitting working on them a job that will probably continue well into the end of this year - but the hope is that we can this summer start replacing the first larger chunks of icon theme with the new one.

Below are some initial sketches for the work being done. Light colors using the color scheme and a square shape are the obvious first things you might notice. The square shape was a large debate in the group but it won out in the end due to the ease with which it could be aligned properly in comparison with individual silhouettes.

At the same time Fabian is working on system tray icons to fit the theme. Here the idea was again, roundness but more light weight to balance up the solid blocks of the main icon theme - at the same time we wanted them LESS natural using symbols instead of pure images of the objects they represented.

One thing that should be mentioned - the icon theme is monochromatic but will adjust its color to that of the color theme making it shift and blend better with whatever color scheme you prefer.
Ideas are in the making of using the base color - Plasma Blue in the MAIN icon theme as a shifting color creating an icon theme that followed your color choices closely and changed itself to fit.

Next week we will talk about shapes and themes and also touch on the subject of marketing.

Monday Report #3

In which we talk about, alpha-beta, about release methods, moodboards, colors, mockups and icon ideas. We will talk about goldstar community members and a few other things.

See that background, behind the "K"? You will see more of it in the future :)

Another week has flown by, and what a week it has been! We are getting closer and closer to cracking the future themes for Plasma as well as Applications visuals. Ideas for layouts are being hammered together and there is plenty of things milling around in the VDG. Consider this blog the Beta to our Alpha work. We are one step ahead of it but present things as they get nailed definitely. So what you see here is the work done the week before the last.

...

First off lets talk about releases. We all know how these things are supposed to go: some teasing and then at a given date "The Big Reveal". Not so with the next version of Plasma. One of the things that I am so completely over-the-moon about with the way the Plasma Devs are handling the release for Plasma is that it will be done incrementally. What that means is that beyond the basics - the cool backend things, some slight visual changes - the first release of Plasma wont be anything drastic. The next release of Plasma will contain a little bit more in terms of change. The one after that a little bit more.
Why this slow pace? Because it's one thing knowing that your ideas and changes are sound and correct - another to see how we all react to them IRL. By changing bit by bit there is more room for community participation - for everyone to try them, see what they think, give feedback and suggestions and change or add to them if we have to - when there isn't ten thousand different things that are changed, hinging on each others existence to work.
This may not be great for marketing - everyone likes to write about a big splash - but it will be an insane improvement for the community and when the choice is between those two... well you know which side of the toast our bread is buttered on. :-)

...

Then lets talk about community participation! Now you all know that there are plenty of things to take part in the forums I hope? Plenty of ideas waiting to be commented on, plenty of dev's looking for design help. This is one of the best easiest ways to help KDE in a very practical way. Don't be shy. Jump in and get the ball rolling if you have a great idea or better yet look at the ones who need help and we will try to get you in contact with the devs :)
I also want to give a shout-out to one of the community participants for being an inspiration to me personally, you rock! (but who wants to be anonymous sadly)

...

Now let's get down to the moodboard! Two weeks ago this moodboard was posted in our group as a way of describing the theme we chose before that (presented in last weeks Monday Report). Now a moodboard is a way to define and describe the theme and the emotions so that all members of a team can grasp it, find it accessible and as a center around which to communicate further about other ideas.

The tricky bit with moodboards for something so big and complex as the Plasma Next desktop unlike say a printed publication or an ad-campaign is that you often find yourself striking too far out or being too specific - I think this one was a nice mix of it all and shows the look we're going for. Something clean, something futuristic but still bright, "hopeful and human without being too clingy" as it was described. (from top left to bottom right - Eve from Wall-E, City Scape from mirrors edge, "Futuristic City", "Cleaner", Flat Android Icons, Still from 2001 - A Space Odyssey, A lightbulb and a Pantone Card, Still from Mirrors Edge and A redone Star Trek Federation Insignia)

...

Colors. What about colors? The eagle-eyed among you may notice the Pantone card in the moodboard but before you link it with the end result I should post the correct color guide.

Now picking colors is a huge and tricky subject, its dangerous and involved a massive amount of debate. But when one of us (Cuan I think it was) posted the main colors to this we had a winner. The combination of greyscale hinting towards the blue side of the color scale and a stronger and lighter version of blue as main spot color played well together.
Combine that with a broad swath of strong colors from the other sides of the color wheel to counteract the blue-grey scale and use them sparingly to create striking visual change at times - a powerful exclamation mark when needed.

You may notice the transparency levels on the right. We will stick with those three levels of transparencies in all situations to avoid clashes and tricky details that may make: Transparencies are complex - especially in large flat work-communities with a lot of different designers and devs at play.
Now remember that colors are tightly connected to the individual themes - this is for the two base themes that are being planned - but the colors will be used for all visuals for Plasma Next, marketing, logos and imagery, and my hope is that they will find their way into further design work within the KDE application ecosystem.

There is a final tiny thing about colors - Sunburst Yellow - some have claimed that it feels "dirty" or "smudged" - but we will stick to it for now and see how everything pans out.

...

What about icons, well that's an interesting subject - we have some rather interesting news not only about Fabians systemtray icons, Acidtrays icon theme (yes a new icon theme) but also Andrew Lakes icon work. There will be more info of this next monday report.
Another thing coming next week are details on visuals and shapes - there are some nice news coming there too :) (soo many fun things that are still secrets .... iiiih)

So next time - there will be more and more community information coming along and of course next monday more about Plasma.

Valentines Special - Talk is cheap

In which we talk shortly on Valentines Day, refer people to the forum and comment on the comments of blogs. Also a short informational about whats going on and the issues facing us.

Juliana Coutinho / Creative Commons

I have a philosophy, I have several actually, but one that sticks out right now. Sometimes its better to just get going and do something than talk and plan for it forever. Its in action we show where we are going and its also only with some kind of result we can talk more precisely about what needs to be changed. Since it's Valentines here I like to think about it the way I met my husband. Our first date was done with skepticism from my part. I didn't know him that well, he seemed charming but I wasn't sold completely. But the only way to find out was to actually do something, to go out with him, and when he walked over Iron Square in Gothenburg towards me smiling nervously I think that was when I knew. But it was only through action, no matter how ill prepared it may have been, that we found out. It's only through risk that we gain the greatest things.

So I tend to applaud action first and then talk about problems with those actions later.

...

... and I tend to take negative comments lightly. This may be a bit of a "uh-oh" moment for many as there is a false equivalency between "commenting" and "criticism" in Open Source which combined with the idea of the "customer" tend to wreck havoc with projects, but hear me out here:

Talk is cheap, some talk is cheaper than others. Anyone can say "This sucks". It takes no skill, it offers no input and its often more damaging than the original problem.
"Criticism", valuable criticism, is being able to not only say WHY something is bad or better yet suggest a fix, but also do it in a respectful way and a pedagogical way. If you can't even say whats wrong without resorting to rudeness and failing to properly describe it - chances are you have no idea what you're talking about anyway and nine times out of ten, your comment is a bigger problem to a project than the problem you are trying to address.

...

Now for those who write blogs and get the first kind of comments on looks - refer them here to the Visual Design Group forum and say "Put up or shut up". A mockup isn't magic, a written suggestion isn't Olympic level mental acrobatics and being able to publicly and in an orderly way DEFINE what it is should be done - is not a high bar to clear. If you can say "this sucks" chances are you are capable of being a mensch about it and think about WHAT sucks, HOW it sucks and how it can be FIXED so it doesn't suck.

...

But aside from that, whats going on with the VDG? Well for starters a majority of our designers are on Valentines Day leave (this one will too as soon as this post is done), we have a new member Andrew Lake a contributor to Bangarang and a designer of note from Seattle and things are slowly moving in the right direction!

Shapes, shadows and visuals are coming in place for Plasma 2 which swallows most of our time, attempts to balance it with design work for Plasma NM has been obviously tricky but hopefully they will get some help and there are PLENTY of work posted in the forums - so write a suggestion, post a mockup - don't be shy - better to do and doubt it than don't and regret it!

Next post will be the Monday Report and contain color choices, some motif's and our early moodboard. So stay tuned!

VDG Weekly Update #2

In which we slam open the doors to the new home page, the new forums, invite new community participants, talk about webdesign, marketing and icon work but focus our attention on Plasma NEXT and the themes and ideas behind it.

Its been one hectic week! Our webdesign crew have worked their little fingers to the bone collecting assets and content, trying to marry webdesign with our ideas for visual design with Plasma NEXT (more on that below) but they pulled it off after a lot of 11th hour panic! Elena, Cuan and David have really gone and been superhuman in their efforts. A special thanks to the Sysadmins in KDE is in order!

...

Please check out our new group page at vdesign.kde.org ! We will try to post assets to it in the future, links and tutorials so keep it handy and bookmark it for future reference. I have too many "huzzah's" and too few exclamation marks in my computer to explain how happy I am with everything so far.

...

But wait, there's more! We've also kicked open the doors to the forums at the KDE-forums where we will not only try to organize our work from now on, not only post ideas and future plans but also invite YOU to comment, contribute and be a part! Post your needs if you're a dev. Post suggestions if you're a designer! Or comment! It's all there!
A mighty hearty "thank you" to the admins of the KDE-forums for putting up with us! You guys are fantastic!

...

Beyond that the week has been a hustle and bustle of trying to get a solid set of design ideas going for Plasma NEXT with not only a set theme (presented here and in the forums shortly) but with mood boards, asset-specs and wild ideas!
We have a future move into a new icon theme for Plasma that will slowly slowly unveil (you will like it a tad too much).
There is also work under way porting a few popular GTK icon themes to KDE (with their designers blessing) so you guys can enjoy all the icon-wonder that exists "on the other side of the fence" while we (sloooowly slooooowly) work and unveil the new icon theme.

...

"But wait!" I hear you say. "You said something about Plasma NEXT and themes and stuff?" you cry.
Right, I did... Lets start this off with talking about themes and moods. Themes are relevant because they provide a starting point on which to build further design work. The mood, the sensation you wish to convey with all your work - from marketing to icons, to fonts, to windows, to colors, to layout - everything hinges on your collaborative mood.

So what is the mood we're going for with Plasma NEXT in the VDG? A few years back I read Chuck Paluhniuk's "Invisible Monsters" for the first time. In it the characters at one point go up into the Space Needle in Seattle built for the 1962 World Fair - an exhibition about the future seen from the eyes of people in the 60's. Standing at the top the protagonists throw out postcards down to the street below - postcards from the future that never was to the reality that is.

One of them writes "When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?". For all of us with an interest in art history and scifi you know what it refers to. Around the late 1970's the Future changed into a vision of a dystopia or an apocalypse. Before that, the future was Star Trek, Barbarella, the Jetsons - shining white corridors, a sensation of humanity overcoming all odds with the aid of amazing technology. Free from the bounds of our current reality humanity explored, lived and created. All this with a sincere trust in the wonders of technology and science.
But then the 70's came and things changed from the Seattle World Fairs vision of shining airy rooms and windows looking out over verdant forests into an atomic disaster with raiders battling over gasoline in an ever-reaching desert or an underground dystopia ruled by machines.

The theme of Plasma we're going for is the "Future that never was". Based on the technological wonders of KDE, all the brilliant things going on behind a sleek facade, we will try to instill the users (us) with a sense of wonder and optimism for the future, for sci-fi. A trust in technology and breakthroughs for a better tomorrow.
Clean, effective but still human and inviting. Brightness, contrast and open air but with rounded shapes intersecting sharp lines and warm, strong spot colors to balance and help bring a human feel to it.
Turning back the clock to a time when amazing technology helped us to boldly go where no man had gone before.

Next time we'll talk colors of Plasma NEXT, how changes will be handled and go into specifics about icon work.

You better work!

In which we gush a little bit of praise for music, talk about personal experiences with work ethics and organizational techniques (from a personal perspective), coming events and talk about the bliss of working with talented people.

Image ©darrentunnicliff, http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrentunnicliff/4510834607/  CC by-nc-sa 2.0

Right now the song Supermodel with RuPaul is going on repeat: "You better work!" I may not "make love to the camera" (which any photo of me will be uncontroversial proof of) but my work ethic and the rest of the VDG teams, could make Martin Luther blush in shame in comparison.

...

One month have passed since I promised my soul to KDE for a year. Leading up a project within Open Source is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Its allot of work but its also a good moment to think about how to organize several talented and genius people within an open structure. Trying to get their talents to best use. Trying to make certain that they will get rewarded for all the genius work they contribute.

The more I think about it the less this has to do with the common AD work I've done before and more with union and nerdy work. I've been a union member most of my adult life and with a background within the left wing (this is in no way a political statement - its just who I am and my background) as well as in the nerdy convention circuit.

There are some lessons from these areas that I take with me into this:

Dig where you stand!
Trying to make things change elsewhere is never as good as starting with where you are. You dig where you stand creating the change you want in the reality you are first then it can spread.

Its not what you say, its what you do!
Talk is easy, but its only in action and movement that we define the direction we're going. Self doubt and care is not as relevant as creating stuff now and fixing them as the issues crop up. Less talky-talky more worky-worky.

Collaboration is better than the Lone Genius!
You suck when you work alone. You might feel empowered by being the one making all choices but you're fooling yourself. You will never be able to keep it up for long and it only works if no one in the world is as good as you. Which isn't true. Swallow that pride and just ask for help. Know when people are better than you, shut up and just learn.

Pride is not the same as Honor!
They may feel the same - but they aren't. Honor is knowing when to back down, pride is refusing to. Honor is being gracious and kind, pride is when you're not. An honorable person is someone who is happy for others successes and helpful when others fail. A person filled with pride is not.
Being proud of what you've done is good - but without some honor its only boastful nonsense.

Always remember the team!
You stand and fall with them. When you take a hit for the team - you will be rewarded for it. When you let them down or betray them - you will ruin it for all. The team should be able to go on with out you, that's what you should aim for - but you can never go on without the team, that's inevitable and unavoidable. Invest in the team - invest in the feeling of a team and you will always come out a head even if you lose.

A magnificent failure is always better than a mediocre success!
This is one of the hard earned ones because its counter intuitive. Failing is never an option until it is. Every time you fail you gain XP because that's when you learn. In all failure but only in the greatest successes. The mediocre ones teach you nothing and will be forgotten quickly. So aim high, crash hard, invest in a helmet.

...

But lets talk about whats coming for a second. Soon we're gonna go public in a big way. Next week will be allot of work for everyone and we have started to hammer out a workflow which will be based in the KDE forums with constant reposts and reports here, via the mail list and elsewhere (twitter for example and the KDE group at Google Plus).

Three of the team members have been sweating over a homepage that will (with the sys-admings blessings) go up tomorrow if they can tame the beast of weird SSD-things - the adress will be vdesign.kde.org. The version they have done is great but will get greater over time with more and more information added as time go by, lets do a quick check list of whats coming:

• A KDE subforum to post needs as well as suggestions and comment.
• A set of mood boards and a specified design language available to all, improved over time.
• A swath of design assets to help the budding designer in their work.
• A coming questions column where we post all questions we get over mail. Not only about design but designers asking all those tech questions we may be too embarrassed to ask in public. (its fine, we all have them)

But thats whats on the closer horizon - later on plans are to create short courses in design matter available for all.

...

None of this could have been done without the 13 people, the skilled designers and graphics geniuses in the Visual Design Group that I have the current pleasure to be working with. The work on homepage, sketch-ups for ideas and logo work that has been going on so far has been amazing and next week it will get even more amazinger (it's a word now). 

It's weird, inspiring and humbling asking someone to do it and see them do it better than you ever could! Everyone have done an amazing job but our webteam, Cuan Kneggs, David Brandl and Elena Ramirez have gone far, above and beyond all expectations. 

On monday there will be a more detailed report as well as "things to come" hold on to your keyboards - this year will be amazing!

(as a side note - I, Jens Reuterberg, tend to start writing like a viking saga when tired - allot of split shields and dramatic sayings and considering my current 18 hours of work a day, you will hear allot of Viking Epics from me ;-) )

Monday Report #1

In which an institution is born and the stories of the past week is mulled over. But firstly a short thing about my problems to comment on my own blog and a short "sorry".

CC-SA, PBS

Right, the issue I thought I should mention is that I have problems commenting on my own blog using chromium so if I don't reply fast enough - please don't think I don't read what you've written, its just that I need to move between browsers. So I might comment a tad slower.

...

The idea here is to give a weekly update of whats going on in the Visual Design Group until stuff becomes more and more public. Hopefully every monday for a while.

First off right now we have the addition of four new designers:
Acidrums the designer who made the Betelguese icon theme.
Cuan Knaggs a South African designer working on business focused design at Revolver.
Luisa Pires a designer that focus on webdesign and brand design.
Muhammed Nafees a programmer and KDE dev from Jamshedpur.

More on all ten of us later since I plan on doing something like an interview when the time comes.

...

We're trying to build up the level of trust needed to run a group like this and at the same time compile a good list of jobs that has to be done as well as find a focus for our design ideas.
How do you do that on a very short time when these things tend to take time? You force it. So we've started setting up a short training exercise to get the work going - essentially just spitting out ideas and seeing what sticks. Go without limits, just have fun with ideas and concepts. From there the plan is to go to the realistic.

Simply match up the best ideas from the wild attempts with whats really possible and get a solid design idea out of it. There are some tentative tries with mood boards and suggestions at the moment and more is getting added daily.
By next monday - there will be solid work coming out next monday at this rate.

...

We're also looking at a good sollution to the icon issue. Lets be frank here - our greatest focus is on Plasma Next - and what we need is a more modern set of icons to be used and its to be released fairly soon. But the Oxygen Icon theme is enormous, its one of the most complete icon themes out there and it took about a year of constant work. So how do we manage to get it done in time?
As it is, one solution would be to replace the central icons, the system icons and then move slowly through the whole icon theme. Maybe replacing them with another icon theme to start with and then move through them all one by one?

Aside from that plans for launch pages for some of the underlying technology coming soon are being done and also promo and presskit ideas are being talked about.

...

Finally there is the issue of how to organize a design effort beyond the ten of us there are now? Bugtrackers and mailing lists have met with skepticism within the group to say the least - but how do you keep track of the work that needs to be done, what is being addressed by someone else and how to participate? How can we move from what is now a closed group into a larger community effort?

I'm not trying to be cute and start with rhetorical questions - these are all valid and something that I think about daily. The point was "create a design group and a good workflow and environment for designers within KDE" not "isolate all design choices". This is open source and transparency and openness are extremely relevant, but how do you combine them with design work without getting back to the issues that was before? (again, not rhetorical)