The main inspiration for Folio is the feeling of opening a sketchbook and getting to work or just doodling. Like Plasma, it’s a tool that you don’t need to think about but is in the background and lets you focus on what you want to do (“personal growth”). I tried to capture the feeling of flow . Somewhat different from a sketchbook, Plasma can be used in many ways (“reflection of me”) the designers didn’t necessarily intend it to be used - that why some pages are from different materials. You can close it (both of them), and it’ll keep your thought and ideas safe (“trustworthy”).
To clarify, @aronkvh is neither an employee of KDE e.V. nor a member of the jury for this wallpaper contest. “KDE developer” just means someone who has commits rights on KDE repos, and there are thousands of such people.
Note that you need a sponsor, but this is easy to do if you’re already an active developer on invent.kde.org. Can you share a link to your invent profile?
@ngraham@aronkvh I’m looking at the images Tionisla posted. How hard would it be to add another choice besides Solid Color to give the user the option to use the Accent Color? Technically, one could just paste that color in, but to have the option seems simple enough.
The ability to do transparent/translucent wallpapers such as the ones shown that just allow the color of the background to shine through offers a lot of opportunities for new ideas. A quick change of the Accent Color would not only change elements of the UI, but also the color of the wallpaper. We might even end up with a flood of transparent/translucent wallpapers to choose from as the artists never miss an opportunity to show their stuff.
I also thought about this, and it sounds great, but I’m not sure if it can be done reliably.
For example in this Blender scene, I might render some parts separately to recolor from Plasma, but just changing HSL values can result in artifacts and ugly details.
Might work better using SVG wallpaper where the raster versions could be re-exported by Plasma (theoretically).
Yeah, I also think it can be tricky (not sure about blender). RGBA png images just handle transparency and no colour combos. (There’s no layer effect composition like in Krita (kudos, what an excellent tool!))
The RGBA effect works best having wallpapers with a solid base/accent colour and shades of light and darkness.
E.g. light Folio is however tricky (at least from a postprocessing point of view), the orange is not just a darker version of the yellow highlight, but has a certain amount of red in it. If I use Krita’s “color to alpha”, I can "filter out the yellow to be transparent but there’s a certain amount of red left, which might result in “interesting/unwanted/subpar” results.
These are just great! I love that subtle texture on one of the sheets. I plan on adding them to my personal wallpaper collection. Some feedback anyway: the shadows feel a bit too dark to me, and I think they could be lightened to reduce contrast and make desktop icons show up better.
Thanks Nate. I kept them dark because adding light from behind made it look weird, but I’ll adjust it a bit more in post. I only have a few icons so that’s probably why it didn’t bother me.
I like the blue pictures most.
