newRPL: design of soft menus

[Helix]

I've tried to imagine several types of soft menus.
My starting point is the following example, which shows how newRPL currently displays soft menus. The primary and secondary menus have been exchanged between the two images:



1) In the following case, both primary and secondary menus are white. Directories and submenus are indicated by a black line on top of the labels. The borders are in very light grey:



2) Perhaps a more elegant solution would be to use a light grey background for directories, probably even lighter than the SD indicator. I don't know if this is possible, and if the contrast would be sufficient. Only a test on the real machine can give the answer.



3) If grey background is valid, then the grey borders can probably be removed. The progressive fading of the labels avoid confusion between adjacent names. That would be a very elegant and simple solution:



4) I'm not sure that the primary menu should be black, because I'm still making errors between the keys when I use soft menus in newRPL. However, here is an example with a black primary menu. Directories are indicated by a dark grey background. Again, only testing on the real hardware can tell if this is a valid solution. I'm afraid that there will be a lack of contrast:



5) Here is an intermediate solution: the black primary menu has the traditional tabs. We lose one pixel for the stack. On the other hand, this additional space between the level 1 object and the soft menus makes the look more clear. I wonder if this additional blank line should be used in the other designs too.



6) Finally, here is an example with all menus in black and dark grey. Again, I don't know if this is a valid solution.



If you have other ideas, or if you have worked on other examples, you can share them in this thread.
For those who are interested, my working file to create these images can be downloaded here:
http://nsm08.casimages.com/img/2016/11/1...633660.png