FillColors Entry - Carbon

Posted by Joshua on Sep 29, 2007 * Add comments
Categories: Flex , Projects , CSS

AsFusion started a new project called FillColors, "Fill Colors is the embodiment of the separation between style and layout in Flex and a demonstration of what's possible in terms of skinning a Flex application. Fill Colors invites designers to show their Flex "skinning" skills and to learn from others by looking at the current styles in the gallery." You can read more at FillColors.com. 

I entered a skin for the contest, which is a Flex 2 Builder License :)  I basically reversed engineered the RainBow theme and the Aqua theme to see how the application takes a skin and applies it.  Once I figured that out, I started playing with the carbon theme.


Carbon is a theme that was inspired by, you guessed it Carbon Fiber. A light weight material used in racing motorcycles, cars, etc... It is also used in the aerospace industry, again because of its superior light weight, flexibility and strength. Are you seeing the analogy yet as it pertains to Flex? I sure hope so!

I created Carbon for one reason, like the folks at AsFusion, I too have thought about how generic the default Halo theme can be. I definitely don't want all my Flex applications looking alike and frankly neither do my customers.

Special thanks to Kyle Hayes for creating the carbon background that I used as the main background skin of the application. I also learned a ton from the Rainbow skin within Fill Colors.

So thank you AsFusion for putting this together, I had some fun and most importantly I learned a couple things from you guys once again! Feel free to improve upon it.


7 responses to “FillColors Entry - Carbon”


  1. Michael Hunter on  Jan 9, 2008 at 11:45 PM

    Michael Hunter I was playing with the skin, and it is complaining that the classreferences are missing like the com.asfusion.skins.filters.CSSDropShadowFilter

    Would it be possible to get those classes?

    Thanks
    Michael

  2. Josh on  Jan 20, 2008 at 6:00 AM

    Josh Michael,

    Sorry for the late response, the error you are getting pertains to two swc files that need to be put into the compiler. If you are using Flex Builder 2 you need to load those swcs manually using the Flex Builder Compiler. The swcs are Mate3.swc and CSSPlus.swc (http://www.fillcolors.com/tutorials/getting-started)

    If you are using Flex Builder 3, just put those two swcs into the libs directory in the project and FB3 will automatically detect them and add them into the compiled app. That should fix those errors.

  3. Josh on  Jan 20, 2008 at 6:03 AM

    Josh Try this link for instructions on how to do what I am talking about above.

    http://www.fillcolors.com/tutorials/getting-started

  4. Josh on  Jan 21, 2008 at 7:29 AM

    Josh Testing a link ;)
    http://www.fillcolors.com/tutorials/getting-started

  5. Josh on  Jan 21, 2008 at 7:30 AM

    Josh Testing a link ;)
    http://www.fillcolors.com/tutorials/getting-started

  6. Josh on  Jan 21, 2008 at 7:32 AM

    Josh Testing a link ;)
    http://www.fillcolors.com/tutorials/getting-started

  7. Josh on  Jan 21, 2008 at 7:33 AM

    Josh http://www.fillcolors.com/tutorials/getting-started

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