Kempelton 3.0

Get Kempelton on Firefox Add-ons.

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 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.