Thanks to some help from Jose here in the Moodle community I was able to put together some enhancements to how Fordson displays categories and courses.
Here are some screenshots of the upcoming release. There are some customizations too such as height and icon chooser from a drop down. You can even turn the whole thing off with a checkbox and use Moodle's default view for courses and categories. Here is a shot from the frontpage and a course category page.
This is scheduled to be part of the next release version 1.2.6 which is on github but a work in progress.
