This is my first critique ever so don't judge me.

Vision

First thing you gonna notice is that the amount of time the artists has put on this, even the smallest things are so perfect as they can ever be, taskbar should've differently colored because it's very hard to find suitable icons to put in it, I would have prefered a transparent taskbar instead of white one. And I wished a version which has no searbox in startmenu, and a version without Address bar would've been great too.

Originality

There's no many theme's which has all the things inside by default, and everything is explained perfectly so you're not gonna mess up your computer while installing this masterpiece. Nice choice to colors and icons, even wallpaper in very unique, and top of the iceberg is those awesome cursors and very cool login screen background.

Technique

Refresh button in Address bar looks unfocused and blurry, it's not that sharp as it should be, "All Programs" text is lower than "Shutdown" text is startmenu buttons which gives unfinished impact (This might be Windows's fault not this theme), and I'm not the biggest fan of the font which artist used in this theme.

Impact

No matter how old computer you have, this masterpiece gives a feeling as if you have a new computer, it even feels that it makes your computer much faster too, you not gonna regret if you install this masterpiece to your computer.

Alrighty, this is my first ever formal critique. I guess I'll just go through all my points in order:

Vision

There is no mention in the artist's comment about why he made Wave or what inspired them, but this is okay. Not every piece of design needs a back story. When I look at Wave, I think about simplicity and soft, natural styling. This theme was never meant to be flashy, it was meant to work. Although just about every aspect is wildly different to the original Windows theme, it all just comes together and works as a single design.

That being said, there are some aspects of the design that I am not so sure about. The most prominent one being the titlebar buttons. When you look at them, they appear indented into the window, much like the text fields but the difference here is, the titlebar buttons are buttons and the text fields are text fields. They are two different elements with different functions, so I have to question the consistency of some of the design decisions. I would have liked to have seen the titlebar buttons sit on the window, like the other buttons in the theme. The indented look of the titlebar buttons I feel takes away some of responsiveness of the theme. By this I mean, the buttons have no distinguishable hover or pressed states, which limits their effectiveness.


Originality

What can I say? There is nothing else out there quite like it. There are very few themes that are so wildly different to the default theme that remain this popular. Wave really does have it's own unique style.


Technique

Just about everything in the design screams quality. It all looks like it has been hand-sculpted for a particular purpose. The amazing range of little bits and pieces that were included in the installation packages makes this one of the more "complete" themes out there. Very little has been left alone. The author obviously supports this theme more than a great deal of other authors out there. He has included fixes for Firefox, an easy to use installation wizard and links to other software and Wave bits and pieces to make the experience more complete.

I did have some quite serious problems when using the manual installation (I understand that no support is given for it). I decided to use just the visual style, thinking that some design features would be missing, but it turns out I had more serious problems than that (some of which appear even with the full automatic installation):
- Start menu has no Aero blur behind it
- Address bar arrows (example > example) appear cut off
- Network task tray popup has white pixels on the rounded edges
- Task band slide dialog (can't remember the exact term) has blurring of the top border
- Newly installed start menu items (that would appear orange in the default theme) have a problem with the border on the left side.
- The top left corner of the start menu appears opaque when the task band is at the bottom
- Lone titlebar close button is not centered and has two glyphs

Most of these are small issues and the ones that only occur with the visual style are a bit trivial, but it would have been nice if the visual style was developed so that it worked well on its own, and the extra goodies were just there to enhance the experience, not fix it up so it functioned properly (not to say that all the extra goodies were required to fix up some of the problems).


Impact

I've already touched on how very different this theme is to the default one, so when you install it, it really does have quite an impact. Sure, as is the nature of visual styles, the way you work on your computer probably won't change much, but the way you feel about your computer, that's another story. The theme really does transform the whole desktop experience, so there is quite a lot of impact when you first install it.