Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass skins were added to the Substance look-and-feel about two years ago, and they proved to be quite popular among the media-oriented applications powered by Substance. In the meanwhile, tools such as Microsoft Blend, Apple iPhoto and the TweetDeck client have continued refining and polishing the visuals or their own graphite-themed interfaces, and time has come for a facelift of Substance skins as well.

Here is a screenshot of a sample application under the Raven Graphite skin in the latest stable 5.1 release:

and here is the same application under Raven Graphite in the latest 5.2dev drop:

Here is another screenshot of the same application under the old Raven Graphite visuals:

and the new visuals under the latest 5.2dev drop:

There are three major changes in these screenshots:

• Light highlight color schemes for lists, tables, trees and menus
• Lighter and partially translucent inner border painting on the buttons, tabs, checkmarks and more
• Removing the inner border painting from scroll bars

The same changes have been applied to the Raven Graphite Glass skin. Here is the screenshot before:

and after:

And one more screenshot before:

and after:

If you want to take the new visuals for a spin, click on the WebStart button below and change the skin to Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass from the “Skins” menu:

You’re more than welcome to take the latest 5.2dev drop for a spin and leave your comments.