During FOSDEM this year, I met a group of very cool people that put together events about Open Source Design. They invited me to participate this year.The topic was similar to my talk during FOSDEM, but with a twist on the soft skills needed to complete the creation of a new design system for Plasma.The conference is only one day. Something really cool they did was to have something like BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions during the afternoon slot before my talk. We had the opportunity to discuss important aspects proposed by the attendees around design and making your way into the field.Germany, Berlin. FOSS Backstage Design 2026 – Community, Management and Compliance. 18.03.2026 Photo Jan MichalkoSince I was representing KDE in this project, I brought my newly-acquired tshirt from FOSDEM!The experience was great. Everyone was awesome and even met up with new contributors to the VDG. Comments from after my talk were very positive and I look forward to participating in even more events of this nature.Design System UpdateAt this time, the design system keeps evolving. I have gone back to rework some application icons. After reviewing the current designs and consulting with team members, the consensus is that they should be simpler, more approachable. I have made some concepts that I will keep exploring going forward.Additional to that, new tokens have been created. We now have shadow tokens, and I have applied them to all the components that I can think of. They have replaced manually-created shadows from the previous time.Radius and spacing tokens now need to also make their way into the components. Unfortunately, Penpot is struggling today on creating new tokens. I will wait for an update. However, the work involves going through out component buttons and applying foundational spacing tokens to the sides and inner spaces for the components.While this might be long, it is easy. The spacing numbers are already in the component. My part is to create all the spacing components, locate the margin or padding number I see today in buttons, find the base component, and apply the spacing tokens.I am also closely following up on Penpot’s new beta, hopefully coming out soon, with their new rendering engine.I have also connected the Penpot team with our LAS (Linux App Summit) event and hopefully they can attend.More to come!If you’re interested in participating in this effort and have some awesome design and integration skills, join us!https://matrix.to/#/#visualdesigngroup:kde.org