Thanks for the critique. I'll try and reply to some of the criticisms.
First off, the "optical illusion" you are seeing is most likely because you are used to seeing the back button and icon bigger than the forward button, so when both are the same size, comparatively your mind thinks the back button is smaller. This is not so much an optical illusion as it is something that you need to get used to. We will not be making the back button bigger for those styles, as the design is deliberately symmetrical in that regard. In the case of Soft7, it is actually based on a visual style, so we do not have much artistic freedom for that style, as the goal is to make it look exactly like the visual style (and mockup).
The Soft7 icon is something we can look into fixing for other styles.
Rubix was actually a pretty rush job and has a few issues with split menu buttons. A hover effect was never planned for the style, as it was meant to be a very hands on, solid approach to the UI, like real buttons, and real buttons do not have hover effects. Originally I did go with a "half pressed" hover effect at one point, which depressed the button slightly, or made it less tall in other words.
The Soft7 tabs were designed by :devAP-GRAFIK: so again, we don't have a huge amount of artistic freedom over these, but because there are no tabs in the visual style we do have a bit of leeway, and we can work on making the tabs a tad more unique in the future.
Hope that shed some light on the reasoning behind our design choices. Thanks again for the critique.
Alrighty, this is my first ever formal critique. I guess I'll just go through all my points in order:
Vision
There is no mention in the artist's comment about why he made Wave or what inspired them, but this is okay. Not every piece of design needs a back story. When I look at Wave, I think about simplicity and soft, natural styling. This theme was never meant to be flashy, it was meant to work. Although just about every aspect is wildly different to the original Windows theme, it all just comes together and works as a single design.
That being said, there are some aspects of the design that I am not so sure about. The most prominent one being the titlebar buttons. When you look at them, they appear indented into the window, much like the text fields but the difference here is, the titlebar buttons are buttons and the text fields are text fields. They are two different elements with different functions, so I have to question the consistency of some of the design decisions. I would have liked to have seen the titlebar buttons sit on the window, like the other buttons in the theme. The indented look of the titlebar buttons I feel takes away some of responsiveness of the theme. By this I mean, the buttons have no distinguishable hover or pressed states, which limits their effectiveness.
Originality
What can I say? There is nothing else out there quite like it. There are very few themes that are so wildly different to the default theme that remain this popular. Wave really does have it's own unique style.
Technique
Just about everything in the design screams quality. It all looks like it has been hand-sculpted for a particular purpose. The amazing range of little bits and pieces that were included in the installation packages makes this one of the more "complete" themes out there. Very little has been left alone. The author obviously supports this theme more than a great deal of other authors out there. He has included fixes for Firefox, an easy to use installation wizard and links to other software and Wave bits and pieces to make the experience more complete.
I did have some quite serious problems when using the manual installation (I understand that no support is given for it). I decided to use just the visual style, thinking that some design features would be missing, but it turns out I had more serious problems than that (some of which appear even with the full automatic installation): - Start menu has no Aero blur behind it - Address bar arrows (example > example) appear cut off - Network task tray popup has white pixels on the rounded edges - Task band slide dialog (can't remember the exact term) has blurring of the top border - Newly installed start menu items (that would appear orange in the default theme) have a problem with the border on the left side. - The top left corner of the start menu appears opaque when the task band is at the bottom - Lone titlebar close button is not centered and has two glyphs
Most of these are small issues and the ones that only occur with the visual style are a bit trivial, but it would have been nice if the visual style was developed so that it worked well on its own, and the extra goodies were just there to enhance the experience, not fix it up so it functioned properly (not to say that all the extra goodies were required to fix up some of the problems).
Impact
I've already touched on how very different this theme is to the default one, so when you install it, it really does have quite an impact. Sure, as is the nature of visual styles, the way you work on your computer probably won't change much, but the way you feel about your computer, that's another story. The theme really does transform the whole desktop experience, so there is quite a lot of impact when you first install it.
Hey, sorry for (very) late response. It's tied to a number of other buttons but you can use something like this to force it to have its own style - might not work if you place bookmarks in random toolbars:
If you want to add the default sized space above the tabs, right click on a toolbar -> Customize -> check Drag Space. If you want to adjust that specific margin because you don't like the current one, there's a CSS variable which does it. If you're on macOS, the important line is about 159 in variables.css. If you're not on macOS, you can add a new line to variables.css:
Replace "8px" with whatever you want. If you don't want it to affect the tabs when in full screen mode, add ":not([inFullscreen])" to the selector (first line you added).
Overall
