GUI customizing has always suffered one great quandary: what is beautiful and what is usable don’t always go hand in hand. As soon as I got my hands on the iPhone, I began another beautiful addiction in UI modding. Unfortunately, a great many iPhone themes I’ve used have ended up being cumbersome to use after a while. The design overwhelms usability.

Enter DAMINO by anjuna. It’s use of text on transparent icons is stunningly effective, coupled with both a Dock background and a status bar icon that highlight the sense of a UI built on the translucency. It feels like what the Star Trek LCARS interface would have been if all the icon and UI designers hadn’t been killed in the Eugenics War*. In addition, a delightful perk with this theme is that it works wonderfully with light backgrounds. So head over to the forums where user eurotwolow brought it to our attention, and even contributed a few extra icons. Just remember that in order to use themes on your iPhone or iPod touch, they must be jailbroken– and that’s not supported by Apple– so tweak at your own risk.

* That’s my own assumption, based on the utter lack of good design in the 24th century.