Theme Revamp: Further Exploration

It’s been a few weeks since the initial theme concepts for Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 hit the Wiki. This resulted in a lot of great feedback. Which has been explored and extended to things like customization ideas and how exactly to handle the menu bar transition visually.

I have spent some time refocusing on 3.7. Exploring toolbar handling on glass, experimenting with different toolbar button visual styling and ideas on button hovering.

Bookmarks Toolbar Variations

Experimented with a few different styles for handling toolbars on Glass:

• Flat Box: Simple translucent background
• Inset Box: Similar to the above, but with an inset appearance
• Expanded Background (Translucent White): Expand a background from the tab strip to below the navigation bar. Translucent white to remain a neutral background
• Expanded Background (Translucent Grey): Darker but still neutral background
• Expanded Background (Translucent Light Blue): Match Windows 7 toolbar blue
• No Background: Floating toolbar items. Probably the least attractive option due to legibility concerns

Navigation Button Style Variations

Tried some different styles for navigation toolbar buttons. Smooth style(original), more glassy/sharp style and a more plastic variation.

The glassy style strikes me as probably too much. The plastic style might be something more suited to XP.

Button Hover Exploration

Some initial ideas on how to handle hover states. This might be a good place to integrate some color into the more neutral style.

Tags: Experimental, Theme, Windows
Posted in Firefox | 5 Comments »