I agree with most of what Carl's saying, actually, especially about Alex the Doggy :)
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Simon and I had a brief chat about cultural differences on IRC and I think that's something that's going to be difficult to bridge. The Doggy plays well with Yanks, it seems (Carl's a Yank even though he's a medical student at U Heidelberg). Having done business in the UK for about 12 years and suspecting that not much has changed in the decade since I did that, I can understand where Simon is coming from.
<p>The professional software world UK is a bit more uptight and stodgy than in the US, that's just a fact.
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But I still like the Doggy. It's time for the Brits to learn to loosen up :)
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I like the idea of a clean, sparse banner and a toolbar. In general I personally like Carl's banner design a lot. It seems very clean and sparse to me and for those of you who've looked at much of my wildlife photography and maybe even my code you'll understand that I try, at least, to be consistent in this preference.
<p>I still like rounded corners ("curvy boxes") on table headers as I personally think it tends to emphasize the whitespace separating table boxes. And I like whitespace separation. I think one can cheat a bit and cram one's tables together slightly while still having the effect of separation with rounded corners. I personally didn't find the contrast between the color chosen for the header type in Jun's design #1 sufficient and the gray too dark in the box, as well. I'm using a ViewSonic flatscreen so YMMV if you're using a CRT.
