Essence

Changed name from Serenity to Essence as I missed there was allready a skin with that name, will update mockups later to reflect that.

There is no lack of great options when it comes to finding a skin that suits you for XBMC, but another one couldn't hurt.. right?

I've previously dabbled with creating or modifying skins for MediaPortal when I was using it, but never finished the skin I was making since I moved over to XBMC as soon as PVR was working for it. Now that itch to create a skin is back and I would therefor like to show "Essence" to you.

My basic idea of the skin is that it should be, where ever possible or logical out of it's way for the user or configurable to be out of the way if the user chooses to. Organic and fluid comes to mind in terms of the flow of the skin and it's animations and not to distracting to the eye. With "Essence" I'm aiming to firstly do a skin that I want to use and have plenty of configuration options available for everyone to customize it to their liking if they want to use it. Perhaps not that many configuration options as in Aeon-Nox in the general direction that is available in Aoen-Nox since I just love that skin.

I've drawn inspiration from the design and interface shown in the thread by "phyek" as I think that some of those interface elements shown and discussed there by various users are just beautiful and some of those elements fits right in to what I've had viewed for "Essence" so big thanks to him and the others contributing in that thread for alot of my ideas and inspiration.

I will try to finish up some more mockups during this week, specially on the different media views and PVR functions and some of the animation flows so you can get a better feel for it. I also have a few ideas I want to try out to make it less "boxy" and more unique then what it currently is, so these are a first line of mockups.

The skin is available on GitHub. if you feel like checking it out though it is still in very early development. If you are interested in helping out and work on it, I'm open for that so give me a PM.

Other variations of the mockups are available here.

Thanks for reading and viewing!

/orecus

Homescreen Mockups

*The glow behind some of the items is to my understanding not possible, might try a general "glow" image that gets placed behind the text to simulate it though.

OSD Mockups

*Using some icons from Confluence as place-holders for now.

Skin Configuration Mockups