For a couple of weeks now I have been working on a new admin "skin/theme" for SS. This basically grew out of frustration with the lack of UI refinements over the years for SS. This is not a redesign of the admin interface but rather just a look and feel modification to make the user experience more enjoyable. Color palette, grid/padding, typography(!), contrast/emphasis were all modified via the CSS. I did not touch any markup as it would introduce a whole new set of problems that I didn't feel like dealing with.

The other motivator for this was to roll up my sleeves and jump into CSS3. Most of the gradients and buttons etc are for the most part using CSS3 declarations.

I usually don't post work in progress but thought I would throw it up here to see if there is any interest and maybe motivate me to push on. Lots of incomplete items in this screen grab. The Page Tree action buttons and the Image panel need some refinement and a whole slew of other things. Anyways let me know your thoughts

Give this a try:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/121519/ss_admin_01.png

Thanks Willr I appreciate it. I have been following the 3.0 discussion via Uncle Cheese (who I sit next to at Bluehousegroup Group). That was part of the reason I didn't take it upon myself to do a whole redesign of the ui as I know 3.0 is immanent. I didn't realize they already had some screens done though and will definitely check it out.

I like it. Where is download?