Elegance WindowBlinds skin is here!

Published on January 2, 2008 By Draginol In WindowBlinds

Elegance is here

About a year ago, Stardock formed a new skinning team called Stardock Design. It brought in many of the top skin authors from around the world into a single place as full time skinners. It also provided a budget to be able to contract some of the part-time skinners as well.

The work is starting to pay off. And this year you will begin seeing a significant increase in free skins coming from Stardock Design. The idea is to help provide examples and help to other skinners as well as ensure that users have a steady supply of very high quality skins.

The first skin release of the year is Elegance. Designed by Alexandrie, the co-founder of Pixtudio who now works full-time at Stardock in Plymouth Michigan, Elegance is an attempt to provide an alternative to all the glass-style skins you've seen in recent months but one that is clean and...well elegant. Having used it for awhile, I believe this is one of the best skins of all time. It combines high polish with high usability.

Subtlety is the rule

You can download it here:

[Download Elegance for WindowBlinds 6]

Comments

dancetomuch

on Jan 02, 2008

very nice

Quentin94

on Jan 03, 2008

vStyler

on Jan 03, 2008

Subtle Indeed.

Mordalo

on Jan 05, 2008

This looks good.

ElijahBaley

on Jan 28, 2008

First, I will say that I do like this skin. However, saying that it has high polish is going a little overboard. To me, having high polish means that it works just as well as the standard Aero or Luna themes (depending on OS) for all applications. I have yet to find any WB theme that works completely. I find this extremely annoying. I want to love this Elegance theme but the effects when selecting files in Windows Explorer are horible. I can't tell what is selected half the time. The other issue I have is the new tab controls in applications. Specifically, Visual Studio 2005 Professional. When the tabs auto shrink I can't read the text on the tabs at all. This doesn't occur with the standard Aero theme. (I am using Vista Ultimate) I have seen other applications have problems too but I can't think of them right now.

Thanks.

Frogboy

on Jan 28, 2008

I'm not sure what to say to that Elijah. In the two examples you give, Elegance works fine for me.

Selecting files.

Tabs in Visual Studio:

Could you show me screenshots or be more specific? If there's an error or a buglet in a skin, we definitely want to improve it.

ElijahBaley

on Jan 29, 2008

Hi,

I sometimes can sound more harsh than what I mean too. I apologize for that. It seems that I may have been wrong about the selections. I usually keep mine in list view and the color of the boarder was light for that view. There really isn't anything wrong with it though.

As for Visual Studio, notice the text on the very left shrunk tabs. Look at this before and after:

Before:

After:

Really, now that I look at it, the issue is not that bad. But I do wonder what causes it.

I like this skins and hope for more like it from the team.

Thanks.

ElijahBaley

on Jan 29, 2008

Another thing I noticed is some menus are funky. Any idea? I have decided that I like this too much to not use it. Let me know what you think about these screen shots.

Frogboy

on Jan 29, 2008

Evernote? Where can I get that?

As for the Visual Studio glitch, that looks lamost like a WB bug. Will have to check it out.

ElijahBaley

on Jan 29, 2008

Evernote.com. If I tell WB to ignore it then it is fine. The software that my company develops and sells does this too. Unfortunately, I can't get you a copy of that. I know for a fact, though, that we use a non-standard control library.

Thanks for your assistance.

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