Softblend 1.3
Just updating the Softblend theme to version 1.3, with theme manager 1.3.2 some features should be included.
Can be downloaded from my site amongst more pictures and info.
hope you enjoy it, and I will continue to design it and make small fixes for issues that I arrive on.
That’s a nice one.
The buttons remind me somehow Avid buttons.
Looking nice, also like your dark theme!
Would have named this something like softBlend and roughBlend
(then there w’d be place for smooth[eg. glass]) for the dark one,
or perhaps lightBlend and darkBlend respectively instead, though. 
Still, cool stuff though. 
The dark one works very good at home, or in studios. but at offices, or places with natural light it’s get washed out. The dark one was also heavily influensed by a image roller app im using.
This is a mixture of avid / softimage / c4d etc. but blenderified. 
Softblend wasn’t that bad. Softscene, softblow, softbrush … have to finnish up on the gui’ elements.
then some interesting fact. the 3d viewport bg color is #3d3d3d 
… kinda dark.
Im thinking of having it 5d5d5d, or more brighter. have to check out what works best.
wireframe will be dark, #333333 or almost black #111111
selection will be white or bright, and NO ALPHA at all. So the mesh faces will be fully opaque same with menues.
I like it.
Soft contrast? I’m hoping the gray is due to the “snapshot”. I do like the “sparkle” and “clarity” - still seems subdued. To be honest, despite the “gray”, that is pretty good
Nice balance between dark, light, and highlight; you got some working “even” tones too. Gray works.
Nice theme. I’ll certainly have a go when you have completed it.
Agree about dark themes being washed out in office lighting. I find the 2.5 default dark background and grid much harder to see than the old 2.4 version, which had a lighter grid.
this themes gonna have a pretty dark 3d viewport, but the grid’s gonna be lighter. me personally, I have the grid disabled unless I have background footage. trying hopelessly to match up the perspectives … oh the days when we have a match mover built in blender.
The theme is overall more “flattened” than the original theme. I do like the work the devs put into the “shaded” theme option, really neat. and with the simple high and lows (+10/-10) settings you can pretty much do most stuf.
here’s the scrollbar one of the few elements that’s shaded.
Also, with this im abandoning the “dark” or almost autodesk-ish 50 50 50 RGB darkness. And going back to blender 2.4 series almost in lightness but mainly softimage is the inspiration.
From softimage I’m trying to duplicate the soft impressions you have on buttons/menues when hovering.
header option being active.
one of the hardest things to set color is the key-ed , driven , and animated - state colors, the original theme has done this really well because the back button color is quite bright.
My theme does the oposite, number inputs and value sliders (which are most often keyed) are darker than the gui. by bumping up the text to clear white #FFFFFF Im trying to get maximum contrast so I have more colors to chose from.
this is the result so far, i’ve chosen instead of the green a bluish hue for the “animated” values
and kept the standard yellow-ish color for a keyed frame.
The driven is quite hard and I’m leaving it in the purple color spectrum. but all have gone from a bright clear hex value to a more subtle duller value.
that blue speaks tons for me as scandinavian, i knew I was spot on for animated color. just breathes 90s auto and aviation industry 
… I somehow think of Scandinavian Airlines and SAAB. well well less rant. more finishing up ont eh theme and releasing it.
Looks very nice, shall give it a try when you release it.
So when are we gonna actually be able to save/load themes and styles?
good! btw, I will assign a bright red, #FFAA00 hex value to ALL the colors, I really can’t find … I once ironed out every single color option, but I was stupid. I should have made a cheat sheet out of it. like what is “original” and what is “tool”.
besides the tons of color options for each view.
use a addon, you can save and load themes. w/o loading a startup.blend (thus saving your settings etc!)
I can already now say I will not distribute this theme as a startup.blend
I will give a link or even distribute if possible the .py file that Bart Crouch has made.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/System/Theme_manager
Graph Editor or F-Curve view.
Compositing nodes, goes very discretely against the rest of the GUI, it’s not darker than any other panel or region color. compared to original. the grid is subtle but there. And so are the colors, not to bright but distinguishable from another.
3d view, mesh topology.
For me seeing the topology is so important. the alpha or opacity transparent face colors are totally dropped. if you have a material color that’s cuts with the colors of the edge wires, or vertices or the seam colors or sharp edge etc.
that’s why I’m enforcing a grey non-transparent face color. To many times I have a hard time seeing stuf because the actual shader material color shined through.
When modeling in edit mode the shader material is irrelevant, … of course tabbed back in object mode you see your mesh textures, or shaded in material color.
still not 100% sure about the seam color, it’s the green. I think I’m gonna go by the blender default and have it orange-ish. the sharp edge and edge crease must be way more distinguishable from each other.
Menu, oh the important menu. I’ve tried a background for the menu that was shaded, ala OSX but… it looks weird. especially when the menu can be 10 items long, or almost 20 in some cases. So it’s back to a flat color.
The active menu item is though a inverted shaded, so when hovering over an item, the background for that row looks indented … the colors for the text are #000000 for text, and #FFFFFF for the active item for maximum contrast.
this is something I never did actually know why they designed the original menu with opacity. it just make its hard to read. I mean never put text you have to scan/search with your eyes to find the right option on a transparent background …
even making the case more severe is that it’s overlapping your workspace and depending on the colored object in the scene it can make it worse or easier to read.
so, no transparency… maximum contrast between selected/active item and the rest.
** haven’t still found the color option for the python tool tip **