New Substance skins

June 14th, 2007 | 11 Comments »

The latest drop of Substance 4.0dev (code-named Key Largo) features four new experimental toned down skins. These join the existing skins described here (Sahara, Moderate, Business and Creme) and here (Business Blue Steel, Business Black Steel, Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass). The new skins are:

Nebula which uses the colors of Nimbus and the title painter inspired by the Orange Metallic theme of Synthetica:

Nebula Brick Wall which uses the colors of Nimbus and an orange title painter inspired by the Orange Metallic theme of Synthetica:

Mist Silver which uses gray colors and header painter inspired by Safari:

Mist Aqua which uses aqua colors and header painter inspired by Safari:

Note that these are experimental and subject to change throughout the rest of the development cycle. You’re more than welcome to test them on your application and provide feedback. In addition, a few existing skins have been tweaked a little in the header portion. The Business skin line uses a slight touch of brushed metal:

And the header painters of Office skin line have been changed to use softer brushed metal painters as well:

Related posts:

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  3. Revisiting the Raven Graphite skins Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass skins were added to the Substance look-and-feel about two...
  4. Revisiting the Raven Graphite skins, round 2 Release 5.2 of Substance look-and-feel made a few visual changes to the Raven Graphite skins,...

11 Comments on “New Substance skins”

  1. 1 Mario Ortegon said at 5:51 am on June 15th, 2007:

    Congrats on your new page. I am looking forward to try out substance in my next project. Hopefully it will be pretty soon! ;)

  2. 2 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 6:35 pm on June 15th, 2007:

    Mario – let me know how it goes, and which skins you like best.

  3. 3 Keith said at 1:21 am on June 19th, 2007:

    Hi Kirill,
    Very nice skins as usual! This web page is also pretty nice, can you make a skin of that!? The only thing I’d like changed is the shadow under the business black. It didn’t use to be like that (some past release) and I thought it looked better without it since the header kind of melted into the background, but now it appears to dominate the content pane because of the shadow.

    Mist silver looks way better than boring business by the way, I love it.

    Keith

  4. 4 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 8:41 am on June 19th, 2007:

    Keith,

    The shadow under Business Black Steel was added a week after the first version of this skin was made (see the CVS version 2). It can be easily configured in a custom skin by omitting the call to titlePainter.setPaintingToolbarDropShadows(true)

    Thanks
    Kirill

  5. 5 Keith said at 10:17 pm on June 21st, 2007:

    OK Thanks

  6. 6 Digeratist said at 10:37 pm on June 25th, 2007:

    I love the new skins, but I have to express some reservation about the empty space between a frame’s icon and title text. It’s definitely not what I’m used to, but more importantly it feels like a distraction that draws my eye toward it, wondering what it could be a placeholder for. I can only guess that the intent is to balance out the extra space between a frame’s close and maximize buttons (which doesn’t bother me, BTW), but a frame’s label and icon feel like they ought to “go together,” and there are surely situations where it could stand out as wasted real estate (a small frame with a long title, for example).

    I realize this probably isn’t a skins issue, but I don’t recall seeing it in earlier releases of Substance that I have checked out. OTOH, this may be the first time I tried viewing it with setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated( true ).

  7. 7 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 2:07 pm on June 26th, 2007:

    Digeratist,

    Thanks for pointing this out. The latest 4.0dev drop contains a fix to address this issue.

    Kirill

  8. 8 Digeratist said at 1:14 pm on June 27th, 2007:

    Very nice! So it wasn’t a design choice, after all?

    I was already making a fair amount of use of drop-shadow text in the Ajax half of my app when I discovered the 3.3 drop of Substance. It makes *so* much of a difference I think in making headers/titles stand out in an eye-pleasing way, that I’ve begun wondering if I shouldn’t try to incorporate it into my JTree displays. It would be awesome if Swing and/or Substance had built-in toggles for enabling text and labels to be rendered with a drop-shadow effect.

  9. 9 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 1:28 pm on June 27th, 2007:

    Well, i don’t know if having drop-shadow effect on text would look good on regular text components and labels, but now that you mention it, it most certainly should be added to components with headers, such as task pane, titled panel and month view from SwingX.

  10. 10 1024 said at 4:57 am on August 6th, 2007:

    i wrote tutorial for saving Substance user preferences

    http://sss1024.googlepages.com/substance.html

    in russian only, sorry

  11. 11 Key Largo, Edelweiss and Caireann are finally released said at 9:29 pm on September 3rd, 2007:

    [...] new skins: Nebula, Nebula Brick Wall, Autumn, Magma, Mist Silver and Mist [...]