Just like many other aspects of Quam Plures, the admin console has changed significantly since we departed from b2evolution 3.3.3. We have moved settings around to allow them to be grouped more logically together and totally removed all the blue from the old admin look and feel. This left us with something that looked like this:
Follow up:
OK, it works, it is functional but after I had been using the admin console for a number of weeks I noticed that my eyes were always drawn immediately to the dark headers and not to the parts of the screen that I actually wanted to work with (writing content or changing settings for example). I therefore set off to tone it down a little bit and make it a little more pleasing to the eye - well, to my eyes anyway 
My main goal was for my eyes to be immediately drawn to the parts of the screen I wanted to work with and for the rest of the screen to just blend away into the background and not be distracting. I decided to keep the grey look and feel as it wasn't offensive in any way (admittedly it made the whole admin console look a little, well, grey really but hey, it worked for me) and started to make the colour shifts in a lot more subtle. Anyway, a long story short here is what I ended up with:
Now, the main down side to this new look and feel is that the contrast is a lot less between all the different screen elements and for some people this may be a little hard to work with. However, on the up side, this new look and feel provides a great basis to work from for creating new colour schemes like this one:
Again, it might not be to everyone's taste but it certainly has contrast 
The problem when we are making look and feel changes instead of functionality changes is that we are never going to meet everyone's tastes but hitting a middle ground would be good. An interesting project would be a total redesign of the admin console...... but that is for a different day.
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