On sub records such as detail lines is there and advantage to keeping layouts plain vanilla as opposed to color layouts? Don't want to make them all matching and pretty if there is a reason not to.

Thanks

J

It's really a matter of taste.

I always create white layouts, then color the various parts to suit my general design (usually different levels of gray; I use color for buttons, text, etc.).

If you are sharing the files over a slow network, graphics on layouts can slow things down. However just changing the colours of fields and layout parts etc., shouldn't have any significant effect.

No graphics -- click on the label for the part and change the color.

Taking a quite different tack, there is also a view that overly bright and/or strong colours contribute to user fatigue - a different form of resource consumption, perhaps - and there is no doubt that the stronger the colour scheme the more definite the love/hate response to a screen design tends to be.

I'm not an advocate of 'vanilla' or grey on grey, but on the other hand those lime green on hot pink screen designs make my hair stand on end.

As regards file size and efficiency, coloured layout parts do not impact file size at all. Vector layout objects (eg objects drawn with FMPs own drawing tools) have a moderate impact, and bitmap graphics pasted or imported from elsewhere have a still larger impact.

My advice would therefore to create your elegant and tastefule designs (of course), using coloured parts, vector 'trim' and sparing bitmaps. Over anything but the slowest connections, this should strike a balance between aesthetic and performance considerations.