Of course my wife woudl say I need fashion advice in all areas of my life.. but I'll turn to you guys for this one. I'm starting with some new "looks" for my solutions. My orignal "look" had been a regualr, traditional tabbed layout with buttins accross the top.. this served me well for the past 10 years.

Lately I've gotten goofy with Photoshop and started playing around. The past year I've used the tab type layout with a yellow bar for patient/client's name.

However, with the new "Theme Library" from Scriptology I was inspired to try a Windoze XP look. I thought this might be more natural to the users. Before I spend a lot of time in any one of the looks, I'll sit back and listen to your advice for a bit.

Here's my general look for tha past year... (it's a blnk databse I use just to store the layout object in so the function and buttons aren't there.

Here's a new Windoze XP thing...

and...

So shoudl I scrap the photoshop stuff and go basic, or is it worth playing around with this?

I personally don't care for that wide bar on the left (its too wide and the blue is washed out).

I use the dark blue (80,87,136) of 'The Cobalt' skin I borrowed from this forum with the default tan (230,225,210) that Filemaker and most other apps seem to use and a light blue (213,215,20). Its a nice contrast to me.

If you can do icons and things in Photoshop, bless you. IMHO I don't think users have that much trouble adjusting to the look of an app so long as it's consistent, behaves like other apps, and it doesn't make their eyes bleed.

Steve

I suck at design. Programing no problem. Looks good to me. That could be good or bad.

John

You said "light blue 213,215,20" but are you sure because those numbers in R,G,B values give me a pretty sickly looking pea green. ;)

Sorry, fingers don't work so good at my age...213,215,230.

Steve