Some trends...

Fewer borders

Fewer boxes

Less on screen...

...and make things bigger to compensate

...and use more white-space

(The above 2 points particularly are important for touch interfaces)

More icons, in fact possibly an icon for every button and link

Gradients all over, pretty much every level on the visual hierarchy has a CSS gradient in modern designs

And often curved borders too

Effects such as changing an icon from black&weight to colour upon mouse over

Wider colour palette (Composr is essentially monochromatic due to the theme wizard design)

Obviously this particular task is very expensive, and it is hard to see how it can get paid for. We get a lot of feedback to improve how Composr looks (mostly very vague, from people who don't give anything back to the community). I think it comes from people now used to amazing consumer-grade interfaces on things like iOS and Facebook.

Hopefully some enthusiastic designer(s) can contribute to it out of their own desire to add to the product.

Where we show usernames in some places, consider showing avatars.

Also each e-mail notification sent out by Composr could be subject to a redesign. Facebook does a particular good job.

Current thinking is to kill the default theme concept, and instead have an official 'base' theme (like current default, but a bit simpler, and using some CSS3) and a 'full on' theme that makes lots of assumptions but looks great.

Full discussion:
http://compo.sr/forum/topicview/misc/general/more-effort-for-default.htm

Consider using drop down menus for a site-wide navigation, to replace the zone menu and per-zone menus.

Doing a v. small amount of this for the next release.

A lot is actually happening for v9, as part of the theme refresh. From now on theme improvement ideas will be filed separately.