The MooseTrout Sakai Skin is based on the following main principles:

• Effective use of depth, color, and visual spacing leads to increased usability.
• All tool "panes" should be designed like windows: title bar, menu bar, content area, and status bar. This will allow for minimization ("venetian blinding"), maximization, xmlhttprequest status cues, as well as a clear demarcation of what content on a page might be changed by xmlhttprequest-type calls.
• In order to increase ease of changing of colors, the smallest possible color-set has been used. That color set currently includes 5 shades of the primary color (yes, I would like to get this down by one or two if possible), two shades of a contrasting color, a warning color, and 8 shades of grey, as well as white and black.

The Sakai Skin Tool is a struts-based Sakai tool that is designed to allow any piloting institution to trivially modify the colours of the MooseTrout skin via a simple wizard-based web application. (Of course, if an institution likes the MooseTrout skin enough to use it in production, that is OK, too!)

The tool steps the user through the following steps:

1. choose (or enter in) your main dark color and your main contrast color
2. use the generated palette (or the suggested choices) to populate the 8 or so main colours in the MooseTrout skin