Human Interface Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help you build a beautiful and powerful application that feels at home on SonicDE and works well outside of it. Users will learn how to use your application quickly, accomplish their goals with ease, and encounter fewer issues requiring support.
This document covers SonicDE's design philosophy, common workflows and patterns, standard user interface conventions, and recommendations for platform integration.
The guidelines are adapted from the KDE Human Interface Guidelines. Silver's controls and icons grew out of KDE's Breeze, so the principles carry over directly, but many of the screenshots and icon examples come from the original document and show Breeze artwork and KDE application names.
Why is good design so important?
Design determines how well something fulfills its functional purpose and how enjoyable it is to interact with. If either is lacking, the result will be frustrating. People won't want to use a poorly-designed application, and if forced to, they'll be resentful and spread negativity about it. Avoid this through good design!
Design involves targeted decisions and trade-offs that bring a project closer to its intended goals and usage paradigms. The best applications know which users and use cases they're targeting, and which ones they leave for others. It's better to succeed by focusing on what you can do well than to spread yourself thin and fail. Under-promise and over-deliver, never the reverse.
Topics not covered
This document is a set of design guidelines, not instructions for implementing every specific component. While some technical guidance is provided, much more detail can be found in the components' own API documentation, the tutorials, and the source code of existing SonicDE applications. It's more of a what and a why, not a how.
This document is not intended to be an ironclad law code. By learning and following the rules, you'll understand how to safely innovate within the guidelines, and when it can be appropriate to break them if it produces a superior result.
Contributing
This is a living document, intended to be updated over time. The pages are written in Markdown and kept in the sonic-docs repository.