So… while doing some work on Oxygen I noticed there was no camera-video icon. No Oxygen one.Wille there was already a recently done symbolic one. 
Which honestly felt a bit odd considering cameras are one of those objects designers historically cant resist over designing heee… (but then again i got a bit 2 distracted about the future and forgot to look behind me at what was still pretty good) So I ended up making both versions almost back to back. Now… I already knew exactly what was going to happen. I have been doing Oxygen style icons for long enough to know the amount of work involved. Big reflections, materials, shadows, details nobody consciously notices just to change how the icon feels. And to hide my incompetence as a simple designer It was not just “camera” and realy not a video one but….. It was trying to be a camera. A object. Somthing with texture and personality. Still …. Probably 3 days of work. The symbolic one on the other hand took minutes. And honestly… I like symbolic icons. This is not one of those “flat design killed civilization” posts But it did make me think again about something I keep repeating over and over:“Less is a bore.” as Robert Venturi said. People usually read that as a attack on minimalism. But I don’t. Reduction is useful. Clarity is useful. Symbolic icons are useful. You also cant hide your design failures as easily, and they can work really well. The problem for me starts when simplification becomes emotionally neutral. Copy of a copy of a copy of a nothing. Because thats the thing I care about the most when designing anything. Not beauty exactly… beauty is subjective and honestly kinda impossible to define in any meaningful way. What interests me more is emotional impact. How does it make you feel? Not stricly rationally. But mostly Emotionally. The Oxygen/old\new/skeo\etc icon is probably excessive and maybe even a little ridiculous. Tiny fake reflections, fake materials, dramatic shadows… but then again thats also what gives it character I think??. It tries to create an “atmosphere” instead of just identifying a function. And to me atmosphere matters. Humans are not rationalist grid systems no matter how much “modern” design sometimes pretends we are. We remember things emotionally first. Movies, music, old game menus, interfaces… Nowdays many interfaces and design languages just feel efficient. Functional. Fast. But also weirdly interchangeable. And I think thats why so many modern interfaces evaporate from memory so quickly. Perfectly boring floating in UI space. Visually correct but emotionally silent. Which to me always felt ironic because modernism originally was full of emotion. Optimism. Utopianism. The future as a aesthetic project. Somewhere along the way people kept the reduction but forgot the passion behind it. 
Anyway… making these two icons back to back ended up being more interesting than I expected. They will both be available in PlasmaShell near you…. P.S. welcome to my new home, I’m still alive 
I’m probably gona make a video with some crazy ideas for a over the top theme in QML, kinda as a exercise on the sort of things that should be possible in theme engines. Because even with QML giving us allot more creative freedom people still somehow end up making mostly the same thing over and over again...