Monochrome UI

Not one of my recent UIs, but I decided I liked this one enough to share it with a larger public.

The concept behind this UI was simple: use shades of gray as much as possible and only use color for emphasizing certain elements, all the while keeping it rather simple/minimal, which tends to be the case with most of my interfaces.

The main elements (unit frames, action bar, chat, minimap, timers) are grouped together in one area to see as much of the game world as possible. Buffs aren't displayed; instead I have opted for timers for all the important buffs and debuffs, positioned around my player and target frames as following: debuffs on player to the left of the player frame, misdirection, lock and load and aspect of the viper timers above the player frame, debuffs casted by me on top of the target frame and target buffs to the right of the target frame. The target, ToT and focus names are colored by class/reaction (the focus frame is the one at the bottom of the screen).

In the middle of the unit frames is iThreat, that turns red when I have aggro (the color makes it a nice visual indicator). Under the threat bar I have a few action buttons displayed. To make them monochrome, I made a macro with each ability and used a custom, desaturated icon for it. I have more actionbars on mouseover for other less frequently used spells. OmniCC on the action bars is colored, which gives it a nice emphasized feeling.

Not shown in the screenshot are raid frames. They spawn in the upper left corner and stack vertically. Party frames are still displayed when I'm in a raid, to preserve symmetry. I was seriously considering putting a small grid in the party frames' place, though.

The unit frames and action bars are hidden when not in combat or in a party/raid.

Theoretically, the SCT and nameplates were also supposed to be monochrome, but I gave up on this UI before I could finish them.

The reason I gave up was because I felt the UI was lacking something. It may have been functionality, I couldn't seem to get used to so few action buttons and it bothered me to not be able to see all my buffs. It may have been the fact that the UI was difficult to see in some dark instances. It may have simply been the fact that all those shades of gray just made it too depressing to look at.

Either way, it was an interesting challenge and I quite like the layout, even though I find it somewhat lacking. Maybe someone with a bit more imagination than me can take the premise for this UI and turn it into something better. Cause, in the end, that's why we keep sharing our UIs: to feed our imaginations!