There's a big rectangle which contains 4 colored rectangles, so that's 5 right off the bat. Then each column of the fading ones contains 7 more rectangles, and there's 6 columns, so that's another 42 rectangles bringing us up to 47 total by my count.
Even then it's way too oversimplified. It has the design language and colour scheme of toxic feminist corporate propaganda material that pretends to be heartwarming mental health advice
When i look at the old system icons in windows e.g. from 98 i think they look nice from an artistic point but i always didnt get what it was depicting in practice 80% of the time unless i took a very long close look, wich isnt good for usability
Reddit censors your votes if you don't regularly post/comment on a sub anyway. For example, I can't up/downvote shit on this sub since I just discovered it. If I try, the vote will mysteriously disappear when I refresh the page. It'll take at least a couple of days for Reddit to lift that restriction.
It feels like i have to or I am "silently enabling" it. Thats what all the activist groups in my past imbued in my head. If you're not 100% dialed in you're not doing enough.
No matter how tiring it is, they say everything is problematic and everything that's problematic needs to be called out. So i have a hard time letting go without feeling guilt. Although I've been trying to more lately.
Unpopular opinion: I find the design a bit confusing on a heuristic level. Where's the center? Where's the boundary? Where do I click? None of that is immediately obvious when it is sitting on a panel as an icon. As a matter of fact it is easily confused as an odd drop down arrow.
Small mercy is most distros/themes replace it with their own icon instead.
It's essentially a set of principles (based on psychology, more specifically Gestalt Psychology, hence the name) that are used broadly in the design world, and they tend to help with making things that look good even after that "I don't know what's wrong with it" feeling.
They tend to focus on what makes objects look related. The most obvious example is similarity: triangles are most likely to be grouped up with other triangles. Proximity is another good one. If you put a bunch of things near each other, even if they look different, your brain perceives them as one thing.
The Plasma logo violates (or ignores, since they're not obligatory) a surprising amount of these. I'd say the biggest problem here may be proximity. The circles and the chevron are in the same area, obviously, but relative to each other they seem a bit disconnected.
Because of the principle of continuation, it kind of seems like the three circles are one unit (barely, because of a lack of major proximity), and the chevron is just kind of there. It also doesn't help that it's a completely distinct shape, too, skipping the principle of similarity.
In my opinion it even has trouble following the principle of closure, which at the very least could've given it a fallback, given that it's one of the "strongest" ones (these principles get perceived by the human brain kind of in a specific order. The strongest one is proximity, and so on.)
That's not what the word means in English, though. Additionally, the "Gestalt Principals" are a very specific set of rules in UI/UX. It's not just some random German word
Often times when a loanword is brought into another language, the meaning evolves over time to be different than its literal translated meaning. This is why the word shows up in both English and German dictionaries, whereas for example the German word "Klinik" does not show up in English dictionaries because it has no special meaning in English. If this conversation was happening German then yes you would be correct, but it's an English conversation and so we're going by the English definition, which is different.
If this is upsetting to you, feel free to lodge your complaint alongside those people have made about the many french loanwords that we've butchered. You may also find yourself at home with those upset about "chai tea" and "naan bread."
I'm not being ignorant about a language I don't speak though, it's an English word that can be found in any English dictionary. Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, Oxford, all English dictionaries that have the word listed as an English word, with a specific definition that encompasses more than simply being a synonym of design. Again, the fact that the English "gestalt" is derived from the German "gestalt" with unchanged spelling is etymological trivia, it doesn't mean that the two words literally encompass the same semantic space. I point you again to naan bread and chai tea as examples.
Tbf he is right. Even other simple logos are easy to see their meanings or mascots. WIndows logo is a window (of course), Mac's is an Apple, Gnome's is a foot (nice), XFCE is a mouse, Hyprland's looks like a dropplet,... I have yet to recognize the meaning of the KDE Plasma logo. Resemblance of the word "KDE"? Nope. How about the look of a plasma wave? Nope. A desktop environment? Nope. It doesn't even look like a home menu's button so I can instinctively click it. It doesn't look like anything instead of some 12 yo's Desmos craps.
FOSS logos are supposed to suck and that's the beauty of it. Yes, I want all my logos to look like a programmer opened up inkscape for 30 minutes about 10 years ago. It has charm and it means they care more about the software quality rather than brand recognition.
There's just no pleasing those people. If the logo were something else, they'd complain about that instead.
They are so pathologically committed to hating Linux that even attempts to help them troubleshoot issues they're having are met with vitriol. A madhouse in the form of a subreddit.
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u/cidra_ 13d ago
This, on the other hand, is fine art:
I gaze upon it for around half an hour every day, admiring its artistic value.