I've never been big on looks for UI; it's mostly about minimalized HUD and maximized environmental visibility. Efficiency in system performance and play style is also a plus.
So here are a few examples of my major UI overhauls:
Mercot - Level 6 - Circa May 2006 Ahh...so young. I believe this was my very first screenshot. /Reminisce.
Mercot - Level 20 - Circa June 2006
Guess I'd figured out how to add in the side action bars by this point.
Mercot - Level 49 - Circa Nov. 2006
Some bigger changes by this time. I'd split my chat windows and used Move Anything! to organize my action bars into a little block over there in the lower right corner. Looks like my XP bar is stationed along the base of the screen. Move Anything! allowed you to move any part of the Blizzard UI to anywhere you needed it. You could also adjust the size of the pieces (hence the miniature action bars) and lock them in place. I'm probably also using Prat, a chat addon which provides timestamps.
Mercot - Level 60 - Dec. 26, 2006
DING 60! Missed the sparkles, though. I guess I was using some version of Fu here, along with some kind of portrait window icon animation. This was also when I started using Move Anything! to center all four of my actionbars and station my party member windows along the lower left.
Mercot - Level 60 - Circa January 2007
Heh, WIPE. Here, I've done away with most of the major Fu stuff, though I can see some elements stationed along the top and bottom of the screen. I think it was making my system chug through WoW something fierce, and I had to scale things back a bit. I also seem to have split my action bars a bit, and taken a cue from the previous Fu chat arrangement by placing three transparent chat windows along the bottom of the screen. Lower left party arrangement is still in place.
Mercot - Level 60 - Jan. 16, 2007
Here I am right before stepping through the Dark Portal for the very first time. A few minor changes to the actionbars, off-centering and shrinking them a little. Not many changes to the chat windows - I've darkened up the windows a bit, along with making them taller and thinner.
Mercot - Level 70 - Circa March 2007
Molten Core on easy mode. Still, it was my first (and last) time down there. And it was a blast.
I've done some kind of funky combination of Move Anything! and the default action bar arrangement. I've chat box color scheme I still use today: blue for trade, /say, general and emotes; green for guild, party, raid and whispers; and yellow for battle / experience info.
Paquita - Level 40 - January 12, 2008
And here we are today. I don't use a lot of addons these days. I pretty much stick with the Blizz UI scaled way down, and, as always, have my actionbars hotkeyed. My main addons are Omen (aggro meter), OneBag, OneBank, Prat 2.0, Enchantrix, Gatherer, Lightheaded (an in-game quest helper which pulls info from Wowhead), Tinytip, MobInfo, Auctioneer, and a few others. Mostly they're about functionality and reference, as opposed to looks. I've still got my chat boxes color-coded -- I do that with every new character, first thing. I stopped using Move Anything! over the summer, as one of the major updates broke it. It was a serious pain to have to reset all of those boxes and such anyway. So my party portrait arrangement is default as well these days.
Another large difference these days is my widescreen ratio, which adds a fair amount of space to the side margins. This is 1400 x 900 resolution.
And that's it. I'll probably experiment more with other addons from time to time, but I think what I have now works better than anything I've had thus far. :)
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