CMS Refresh & Tooltips

I was tasked with refreshing the buttons and menus in the existing CMS UI.

I softened the grey/blue colour and rounded the sharp corners on each menu.

I wanted to redesign boring, out-dated icons that didn't give the user a great visual description of what each button was for.

I spent a long time developing these icons if you look back a few shots on my Dribbble profile, you can see the earlier version which featured a little overlap on the inside grey/blue colour. I took this away and made the icons more uniform as they behave as buttons.
The hover state is a simple soft shadow and if the user hovers long enough, they will be met with a short explanation on a tooltip. The active state fills the button background to the same grey/blue that features in the icons.

The tooltips appear throughout the CMS on the most important areas...adding it to the widget buttons was essential for new users to understand the CMS.