RyanThaut.com

Left 4 Dead

Ryan Thaut — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:00:55 +0000

I had this nearly completed sometime in December 2008, but I have been waiting to release it because the people over at Valve were really taking their time about giving me permission to release a skin that uses Left 4 Dead artwork and branding. I finally received permission sometime at the start of June 2009, which is when I distributed the skin to several beta testers.

My testers were absolutely fantastic. I initially was using green as a second primary color, instead of the red that is now found throughout the skin, but one of my testers suggested I try red. After reworking the colors several times, I arrived at a color scheme I really liked, and was very usable. This is a very dark, grungy skin, but the text has excellent contrast, making this skin easy to use and comfortable to look at.

Grass Modification

Ryan Thaut — Sat, 02 May 2009 06:00:02 +0000

Carbon

Ryan Thaut — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:00:38 +0000

Carbon is a very dark, shiny theme inspired by many modern designs, from sports cars to themes for Windows. This one is quite similar to my “Slate” series of skins, but it has a much more glossy finish. Unfortunately Carbon is only for users who can read English; a small portion of the elements have the text embedded into their images.

Slate Orange

Ryan Thaut — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:00:57 +0000

This is one of my most popular skins for Steam, and for many good reasons. Slate is very unique in comparison to other Steam skins, but it matches many Windows visual styles very well. This skin was originally designed by o2dazone of the Steam Users Forums.

Slate

Ryan Thaut — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:00:51 +0000

Slate Colored

Ryan Thaut — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:00:24 +0000

Vista Basic

Ryan Thaut — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:00:33 +0000

This is the other half of the update to my “Steam 3.0 Vista” skin after VALVe added the Steam Community to Steam. This is a complete remake of the previous skin, so there are plenty of changes to make the skin look more complete. This skin features the old layout of Steam, causing it to look much more like an application running in Windows Vista.

Vista Dark

Ryan Thaut — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:00:04 +0000

This is the update to my “Steam 3.0 Vista” skin after VALVe added the Steam Community to Steam. This is a complete remake of the previous skin, so there are plenty of changes to make the skin look more complete. This skin features the old layout of Steam, causing it to look much more like an application running in Windows Vista.

RoyDarkle

Ryan Thaut — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 06:00:00 +0000

RoyDarkle is a twist on the Vista Dark skin; it is inspired be several “Royal” skins for XP, but it is mostly derived from one of my web interfaces, Sleek Black. It is a dark skin with cool blue effects. Currently, I feel that it may receive many changes in the future, but that depends on the feedback I receive.

Simply Nostalgic

Ryan Thaut — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 07:00:30 +0000

This one is not part of the My Bliss series, as the image is not very like the others. It is dirty, grungy, and plain. The colors are not highly saturated, and there is noise in the sky. I wanted to make something different, something I often see in photographs, but never in wallpapers.

I wanted another farmland-like image, but I wanted a different one to add some variety to my desktop wallpaper rotation. I like the way this one turned out, and I made it for myself, so I don’t think I will be doing much to it.