for a month or so now i’ve been contemplating moving all of my individual sites (namely my blog, personal stevey.biz website, project pages, serenity website and lastly my repository) into a single site with a clean interface coupled with intersite integration.
all going well for either £5 or £10 (can’t quite remember as the original amount was  in  either USD or GBP) and by smooth talking tom and with a shifty trade for a website design i should be able to get some badass hosting thrown in to boot.

reviews on previews have thus far been positive so all going well and with a bit of sorting out and re-jigging of my online presence i should have stuff set up sooner or later.

huzzah, i got designing last night and have come up with this for a proposed UI for serenity:

you may notice that there are a few big changes and it will more than likely involve a whole load of work to get finished to an anywhere near good standard which is what im starting to expect of my work now. to incorporate transparency (without blur, ‘cos i hate it) i’ll more than likely be adding in windowblinds.
on the ’still to design list’ is explorer mainly, the start menu and the calendar app i’m theorising about. don’t worry though, it’ll all be awesome when its finished. the proposed finish date for the UI (excluding icon suite and bmps) is release 15.

from start to finish including the odd break or two: 50 minutes

in preparation for hopefully getting dual screens i started converting a few of my favourite wallpapers to match the new resolution (2304×768).
i then started adding in a few longhorn resources to see how things size up and soon it became a pretty complete mockup.

still to do:
clock hands
sidebar tiles
fix tasks on taskbar

originally i planned on just using a slightly modified version of the XP pro about flag which was pretty simple to edit but would only really match the luna or royale themes. heres what i came up with originally, about 10 minutes from start to finish:

however for a new and cool sounding OS it just didn’t cut it. as you can tell, its all a little same-y so i came up with a new design which is partly longhorn inspired but i like it. from start to finish it took around half an hour. enjoy:

some credit goes to chris for his awesome suggestions