With such a simple design as that of the Kempelton reload icon, you might think it would be easy to find the right shape, but I have kept finding the need to refine it in pretty much every version.

Together, I think, the impression is lighter and more balanced and harmonic.

Kempelton Large is also updated.

Icon set additions

The SVG set is updated as well and has a few additions not in the Firefox theme, seen here. They were for an updated Thunderbird theme, but then I lost interest and got less time.

The forward button has a revised shape, inspired by Firefox 4 mock-ups. It is shaded with more depth to better match the back button. The etching around the buttons is removed which helps reducing clutter, and the drop-down arrow has a clearer mouse-over indication.

The SVG set is also updated.

Other than that, the theme has been refined in numerous areas. Among the more noticeable are the icons for back, forward, reload and print.

I have also updated the SVG set with the new graphics.

Get Qute on Firefox Add-ons

The icons in Qute 3.* date back to late 2004, shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0. It has remained fairly popular, but has increasingly lagged behind my skills as well as in completeness. To maintain the theme properly, the only option was doing everything from scratch. And here it is.

With this being a new version, I naturally tried to stay pretty close to the old icons. Still, to make the style consistent, and generally improve the quality, I felt some significant changes were necessary. The result is I think 4 is closer to the original “spirit” of Qute, not to mention just simply better. See for yourself in this comparison.

In addition, as with Kempelton, I’m making the Qute 4 SVG files available and allowed for use under license. Just get Inkscape, which is free and easy to use, and you can edit, convert to PNG or learn from them.

I’ve marked the themes as for Windows on Firefox Add-ons. I’m not sure it’s necessary to mark other systems such as Linux unsupported, but they only allow the choice of a single platform or all. There appears to be many problems on Linux anyway, so it might be best. You can always download and install it manually.

It appears that I’m hardly capable of producing a minor update to a theme. I keep finding things to improve until I’ve remade almost every single icon. Together with the need to create lots of new icons for Firefox 3 (a few are still left), this new Kempelton version turned into another massive project which, I think, is another substantial improvement and sets a new standard for native, functional themes.

I’ll introduce some of the changes. Obviously, the unified back and forward buttons have been adapted from the default theme, something that took a lot of effort to do well. The border radius, arrow shapes and obviously, color and gradients are some of the aspects that have been through countless iterations to find the right appearance. There are also hand-tuned active and disabled state images and, a notable usability advantage over the default, a subtle drop-down hover indication.

Should you prefer to use text labels there are simple arrow-only icons for that. Yet another back/forward variation is seen in the library, glass versions to suit the Vista style.

The Home and Downloads icons are now seen from the front, for better visual balance and consistency. The New Window and New Tab icons now lack the plus signs, which seemed kind of superfluous, although I’m not quite sure about this yet.

A smoothly animated activity indicator, seen here in APNG-capable browsers, makes use of the returning capability for alpha transparency.

Kempelton Large 3.0 and an updated SVG set will be out in the next couple of weeks, I estimate. As always, comments are welcome.