I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on how fancy to make the user interface graphics. For network speed reasons I use boring FileMaker graphics.

--Mike

Version: Developer v6

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

I use Photoshop a lot to make interface elements. The DBs I make are not used by many people at once, so speed isn't as major an issue.

Strictly FileMaker except for iconic buttons.

Up until my latest project, I always used plain old filemaker buttons etc. On my current project I used some aqua style menus and buttons from layoutmode.com (sadly, this site is gone). These items are small enough that they don't seem to cause any speed problems on the server.

If you're referring to fancy graphics as big and snazzy, then yeah, you will have speed performance issues. But it is possible to create beautiful, well designed interfaces that are small enough not to overly affect speed.

I design all my interfaces in Illustrator and Photoshop before creating my layouts in FM. Functionality and good design can co-exist.

Being on the Mac platform I try to make my layouts look like Mac programs.

Header- , Footer- and BodyBackground are being 'pinstriped' by making them a very light shade of grey (custom color, greyslider set to 97%) with one of Filemaker's built-in patterns (5th row, 6 th colum to be more precise)

Interface elements are first constructed using Interface Builder.app and then 'cleaned up' with Photoshop.

As for the poll; I think I'd go for 'more fancy'....

Thanks everyone.

I'm a firm believer in designing an intuitive, user-friendly interface for my solutions. I take great care in putting together a template that will be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of field sizes and formats. I spend time choosing colors that look nice and that users can agree on. For this I use mostly FileMaker graphics.

I have stayed with FileMaker graphics because of speed issues over the WAN and also simplicity of changing things on a layout. Now with the pretty look of OS X, I'm beginning to think the graphics in my solutions seem flat and boring.

It sounds like many of you have had success using 'fancy' graphics for buttons along with FileMaker graphics for other parts of the layout design. I will have to consider this carefully for my future projects.

Thanks for the feedback.

One of my pet peeves is the way that radio buttons, check boxes etc. look so..............amateurish. I wish FileMaker would at least make the system graphics available as part of their regular graphics possibilities. If Microsoft can do it (Excel X), surely FileMaker can.

By the way if anyone knows a good source for interface graphics, I'd appreciate the heads up.

Thanks

Here are three sample files that were posted to this List, I also remember that someone posted a step by step "how to" not long ago, unfortunately, I can't remember the link to it.

Ugo DI LUCA

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=76033

falkaholic

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=50147

falkaholic

http://www.fmforums.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=58734

HTH, and be sure to thank the good folks who made them available.

Lee

FM7 has improved the radio buttons and checkboxes. Prior to FM7 I used graphics, but I'm actually using FM's again. The jagged edges are gone.

Verdana, 10 pt, black (plain), with Edit > Preferences set to Smooth, Light produces nice looking ones - at least on our Windows XP systems. Text fields are set the same size and font, except I also bold them. Our Users like the look of 7 - no complaints about fonts at all.