SNEAK PEEK: Another Silverlight theme pack preview

Building on the positive feedback of the previous Silverlight application themes released last month (Cosmopolitan, Accent Color, and Windows) the design team is working on another theme targeting business application developers.  We don’t yet have an ‘official’ name for this one yet (and to mitigate the confusion of internal code names again, I’ll spare you the code name), but I wanted to put up a preview.  We’re turning this theme around FAST and I wanted to throw it out here in an initial iteration for preview and comment.  This is the ‘dark’ version of the theme and there will be a light version as well.  This represents only the core control set, but like the others will include other SDK controls as well.

I think it is important to understand the goals as well here so that you don’t wonder hey, we need more pixel-shader-gradient-creating-twhirly-things-with-datatype-binding-and-cascading-selector-path-listboxes in themes!!!  In this effort we tasked the designers to build upon the platform of the previous themes and gave them these goals:

• Should be ‘brandable’
• Work with navigation-style Silverlight applications
• Easily tweakable
• Will be used most likely by developers with little customization
• Professional, clean for customer-based line-of-business applications
• Modern, expressive
• Wicked cool

It’s hard to mix all of those requirements into something that will uniformly appeal to everyone.  Given that, here’s the iteration step we are at:

(click the above image for a full resolution image to see some detail better)

What do you think?  We’re hoping to also be providing some font-alternatives (working through various licensing now) so that you could use different/new embeddable fonts. 

We are moving quickly on this time around and there is little time for change beyond this week.  If you feel strongly about something, share your feedback here ASAP…the designers are listening.  We can’t (and won’t) promise that what you suggest will be implemented (again, trying to please everyone here) but we do want to hear feedback from all sorts of folks who would consider using these professionally designed application themes and styles.

Leave your comments below!