May 08

Introducing the “Divergence” Omnifocus Theme

Omnifocus has been my GTD trusted system for over a year now. It’s power and flexibility is awesome, but the look and feel leaves something to be desired.  Things by CulturedCode has been taunting me with it’s superb design.

Visual design is not just about look and feel. It’s about using visual elements to emphasize the meaning of the content. I haven’t found themes which really pay attention to this detail as well as I would like.

So, as any obsessive designer would do, I created my own.

What the content means:

  • Available items should be unstyled. These are the baseline design contrast.
  • Upcoming items should be slightly emphasized. They aren’t any more important than other available items, but do demand our attention. I’ve bolded them.
  • Overdue items are bold and red, which immediately grabs your attention.
  • Unavailable items should be de-emphasized or hidden altogether, depending on the context.
  • Completed items are demphasized with a strikeout and italicized. I de-emphasized them to stay out of our primary focus, but italicized them to easily differentiate them from blocked tasks.
  • Groupings follow the same rules, unstyled for available and demphasized for blocked.

Visual Style

I didn’t do anything fancy with the style. I switched to using Helvetica Neue for all text as it has a clean variety of font variations.

I switched to a subtle blue/green theme so that I can use a white background for emphasis in some special situations.

Download this Theme

This theme is available for download, please leave your feedback in the comments below.

About Josh Walsh

Josh Walsh is a Managing Partner at Designing Interactive. He's also an award winning designer, author and speaker on the topics of User Experience Design, User Interface Design and Usability Research. You can follow him on twitter at: @joshwalsh

3 Comments »

  1. An OmniFocus theme from a UX designer, what a gift. Thanks!

    May 16, 2010

  2. An OmniFocus theme from a UX designer, what a gift. Thanks!
    +1

    May 20, 2010

  3. Nice work! Thanks…

    July 26, 2010


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