First, I want to congratulate the Telerik team on some very, very impressive work on the RadControls for Silverlight suite. As with the ASP.NET AJAX controls you have produced some highly useful, quality components.

Here's the only real place where I continue to be disappointed with Telerik: the circa 1990's 3D-effect, "let's add gradients to everything", bubbly silliness that just ends up distracting users from that amazing app you just built with those sweet Telerik controls. Seriously, someone in your company rrrreeeeeaalllly loves gradients, and they need to chill out. If you look at many of the sites from companies that are noted for their slick design skills (Google, Yahoo, Facebook--could be argued, but it is a clean design) you see that they are completely devoid of this type of cheap visual trickery. Maybe I am being too harsh, but I rate 3D bubble effects and gradients somewhere up there with animated GIFs. I should clarify that I believe the use of gradients and other similar effects is OK, just be subtle about it.

I would love to see Telerik create more designs that adhere to a more minimalist approach...good color combinations, clean, smooth lines and most of all: simplicity. I've had a lot of colleagues who had looked at Telerik but almost immediately dismissed them when they saw the look and feel of the components. I convinced them to ignore the veneer and explore the power and usefullness of the components; you can, after all, create your own themes. However, since the idea is quick integration of controls I highly recommend you start introducing some cleaner themes to show out-of-the-box. I think it would also help to promote Silverlight ahead of Adobe Flex..I've worked a bit with Flex 3 and I will say that I think Silverlight has a lot of advantages over Flex, Flex does have a lot nicer look and feel to its stock components.

That being said, I recognize the impressive amount of work and cleverness that goes into some of the styling and aesthetics of these controls--all I am saying is you don't need those silly UI effects to impress..your components truly speak for themselves.

Just a short rant, I hope I didn't offend (too much) :)

Larkin

Good feedback, Larkin! Thanks for the input. We're definitely planning to introduce more themes for the Silverlight controls in the future, and based on feedback like this, we'll determine what skins are in the "highest demand." Personally, I agree with you that a "mimalist" design aethetic seems to be what's "in" these days on the web, so hopefully we can work on a theme that does that.