I’ve spend the last few days pushing a few pixels improving the alignment of ribbon band controls in the latest Flamingo 5.0dev. This is how it looked before:

And this is how it looks now:

Main improvements:

• Equal amount of horizontal white space around the controls
• Equal amount of vertical white space between the buttons
• Aligning bottom edges of controls across columns

The change is in Flamingo 5.0dev only, so you can still use the final 6.0 releases of Substance core and Substance Flamingo plugin. There’s also a matching test case using the excellent FEST library. Thanks to Ivan for pointing this out and testing the fixes.

Today’s post highlights the design of MuttInk.com.  Featuring an unorthodox layout, the design uses washed out browns, green blues and oranges as the primary color. Hand crafted illustrations employ irregular overlapping ink stains which can be seen on the sidebars and the main illustration, straight but smeared guider lines, the main site logo and creature illustrations in the sidebars. The entire layout is framed by large sidebars that use fading horizontal lines, further reinforcing the hand crafted sketches. The navigation menu in the header uses a beautiful and precise grid, and the same washed out green blue color for highlights. The only thing i would change is to make the fonts bigger for better legibility.

Today’s post highlights the design of RoseFu.net. Set in a soothing beige theme, it uses a pervasive and consistent illustration motive that starts with vintage chandeliers in the header, continues with framed section in the main area and is completed with a full furniture set that frames the footer contents. The vintage tone set by the color scheme is reinforced by using tapestry background texture and antique look of chandeliers, furniture and wall hangings. Note how the davenport and the chest add depth to the footer section by using shadows and lighting. Vignette separators and borders in the main area complete the overall look. The main section has a lot of whitespace around the elements, and features a simple and strong two-column grid that aligns well with the main header navigation menu.

In addition to releasing Trident 1.2 and Substance 6.0, today i have released the following:

• Laf-Plugin version 1.2 code named Landshark. This is used by Substance to find and load its plugins.
• Laf-Widget version 5.0 code named Magnolia. This is used by Substance to add visual and behavioral features to specific component types.
• Lightbeam version 1.1 code named Betelgeuse. This is used to analyze Substance performance and make sure there are no performance regressions.
• Rainbow version 1.2 code named Blackstone. A small test application written with Alex Potochkin to test Substance, Flamingo and JXLayer.

An unfortunate omission is the Flamingo component suite. As much as i would have loved to be able to have Flamingo 5.0 join the release train today, it was not realistic given the time constraints. So, instead of delaying the releases of all the projects, i have decided to have Flamingo be developed in its own timeline. The final 6.0 release of Substance Flamingo is based on the latest 5.0dev daily drops of Flamingo core. As the work on Flamingo core continues, the interested applications will need to use daily builds of Substance and Substance Flamingo. My intent is to release Flamingo 5.0 together with Substance 6.1.