Today’s post highlights the design of Kyee.co.uk. A single page design with a clean palette of light gray, sky blue and black places the main emphasis on the portfolio arranged in a precise three-column grid of thumbnails. The section headers use images for high fidelity typography, and all the text sections use a rather unorthodox center alignment. The footer section uses a soothing sky blue noise texture with steel blue foreground elements – texts, separators and icons – with the deep-browns of the coffee cup being the only exception. Note how the global “lit from above” lighting model is preserved in the drop shadows of the designer’s headshot and the inner bevel highlights of the contact form text fields. The legibility of the large text paragraphs in the footer section can be improved by left aligning the text, making the fonts bigger and / or using shorter line length.
Five years ago, on June 28 2005, Scott McNealy has announced that Sun is acquiring SeeBeyond. Along with that acquisition came a private side project that has gathered an immense momentum inside Sun, undergone name rebranding and took an unexpected front stage at JavaOne two years later. One man’s vision, through perseverance and dedication, still lives on to this day. No matter what my thoughts on JavaFX are, I can’t help but respect that.
The original:
The latest:
The differences:
- Fixed “dead” pixel in the bottom right corner of the ribbon band title (to the right of “Clipboard” / “Quick Styles”).
- Using dark color for the separator painted along the bottom edge of the title pane.
- Consistent Y coordinate of the gloss line between the title pane and the taskbar panel (to the right of the round application menu button).
- Fixed “ghost area” in the top-left wedge of the taskbar panel .
The latest 6.1dev drop of Substance look-and-feel library (code named Trinidad) completes the collection of skins that can be used on the Flamingo ribbon component by adding Office Black 2007 skin to the existing Office Silver 2007 and Office Blue 2007 skins. Here is how the ribbon looks under Office Black 2007 skin:
This skin lives (as all others) in the org.pushingpixels.substance.api.skin and can be used with the following:
- SubstanceLookAndFeel.setSkin(new OfficeBlack2007Skin())
- SubstanceLookAndFeel.setSkin(“org.pushingpixels.substance.api.
skin.OfficeBlack2007Skin”)
- -Dswing.defaultlaf=org.pushingpixels.substance.api.
skin.SubstanceOfficeBlack2007LookAndFeel
- UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new SubstanceOfficeBlack2007LookAndFeel())
- UIManager.setLookAndFeel(“org.pushingpixels.substance.api.
skin.SubstanceOfficeBlack2007LookAndFeel”);
As with the existing Office skins, the new skin is exclusively targeting the ribbon component. Its usage on the core Swing components is not recommended. The next major Substance release will move all three Office skins to the Substance Flamingo plugin.
If you want to test the new Office Black 2007 skin in your ribbon, you will need the following:
