## Description KDE has always had a great many styling options, allowing users to make things look the way they want things to look. Over time, several ways of doing styling and different styles have been developed. However, while many of our applications have evolved and continue to evolve, our way of styling them has not really evolved. The core of the current Breeze style is still the C++ QStyle implementation. Worse, there are several different implementations of Breeze that all have slight differences. This makes any change to our styling incredibly painful and labour intensive. Fortunately, there is work happening to resolve this. On the one hand, there is the Ocean project to create a design system and build uniform design with that. On the other hand, there is the Union project which tries to unify all the implementations and provide a single way to style things. Both of these projects are ongoing, so progress is already happening. However, we want to unite the community behind these efforts, to make sure that we end up with a really unified styling system, along with the capabilities to allow designers to create great styles. This goal is divided in two parts for different groups of people: - The designer folk who will work on the actual design of Ocean with tools like PenPot and modifying Union CSS. - The technical folk who will work on Union theming engine itself, testing it and ensuring it works across our stack. ## What it will take ### Technical On the technical side, we need to make sure Union is used wherever we provide styling options: things like applications and Plasma, but also things like window decorations and Plasma Login Manager. We also need to make sure Union can handle all these and can provide the base we need for both application developers as well as style designers. This includes making sure the styles we currently ship (Breeze and Oxygen) work correctly with Union, as well as investigating whether we want to create platform-specific styles for other platforms such as Android or Windows. For applications, we need to do a lot of testing to make sure all applications work nicely with Union. We need to make sure to do whatever adjustments are necessary for that, either on the application side or on Union's side. Once the base level is covered, we can also make more Union specific tweaks, potentially allowing styling of application-specific controls and expanding the selection of "standard" variants of controls beyond the level provided by the base toolkit. ### Design With all that, we also need to make sure the style designer side is covered. We need to make it easy to create new styles, testing them and publishing them. This will require extensive documentation, both of Union's structures as well as the processes around creating, developing and publishing styles. This is also where Ocean comes it, as it can serve as a demonstration and blueprint of what this process involves. We need to make sure to finish the work on the design system for Ocean and turn it into a Union style. Then we need to document the process, so others can follow the same process. Since PenPot is a large part of the design system work, this will include ensuring we have our own PenPot instance, along with the necessary integrations and processes to go from a PenPot design to a Union style. Any data used with PenPot should reside here on git, so that we have a work history. Design systems need to be harmonized against the system-provided APIs to work properly. Introducing design tokens for Plasma to support takes a lot of effort and ingenuity. ## How we know we succeeded We will no longer be stuck with minor changes to the default style taking months to implement or just not getting done because nobody can or wants to do the work. ### Technical We can make a new release featuring the Ocean style that is correctly applied to *everything*. In addition, people will be easily able to try different styles, or to create and share their own styles using CSS. ### Design Users will be able to take our design system for Penpot source, modify it, hand over their design tokens and the system will apply them seamlessly. ## Relevant links * https://invent.kde.org/plasma/union * https://api.kde.org/union-index.html * https://invent.kde.org/abetts/ocean-design * https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/Ocean-Design---Overview-and-Details * https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/Ocean-Design-Concepts-and-Foundations * https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/Ocean-Design-Implementation-Path ## Champions - Arjen Hiemstra - Akseli Lahtinen - Andy Betts ## Contributors I am willing to put work into this: - Nate Graham - Berk Elyesa Yıldırım - XXX ## Supporters I am interested: - Julius Enriquez - Filip Fila - Christoph Wolk - XXX