professional looking forms, especially menues 1

[BitZero]

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to make forms, especially menues, more professional looking? Do you have recommendations related to colors, fonts, font sizes, etc? Do you have standards that you use? I'm working on an application and the menues look gray and boring. I don't want a lot of flash and pizzazz, but rather something very classy, high quality and professional looking. Thanks

 

[SBelyea]

Useful icons always help to spruce things up. I put together a small database application for our local township that tracks BMP inspections, and use a white on black color scheme with 64x64 pixel icons.

If you are looking for icons to use on your forms (such as "Close Form" buttons, or as links to forms on your main navigation page), I'd highly recommend checking out the free icons on Wikimedia - a large number of icons can be found there which are used on Linux operating systems and are of a very high quality. You can find these icons here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Icons_themes

I'd recommend the Nuvola and Crystal 128 icons (Crystal has some excellent forward/backward arrows to use). These icons are creative commons licensed, so you can use them without any royalty fees.

If you want to make functional buttons with these icons, then simply insert the following code into your On_MouseDown and On_MouseUp events:

Private Sub [b]objectname[/b]_MouseDown(Button As Integer, Shift As Integer, X As Single, Y As Single)
'   Special Effect (Etched)
    [b]objectname[/b].SpecialEffect = 3
End Sub

Private Sub [b]objectname[/b]_MouseUp(Button As Integer, Shift As Integer, X As Single, Y As Single)
'   Special Effect (Flat)
    [b]objectname[/b].SpecialEffect = 0
'   Open Form (stDocName is the name of form to open)
    Dim stDocName As String
    stDocName = [b]name of form to open[/b]
    DoCmd.OpenForm stDocName
End Sub

This creates buttons that depress when clicked and return to their normal state (flat) after being clicked (which is controlled by SpecialEffect = x).

Databasedev.uk also has a couple of example databases with plenty of GUI screenshots - it might be worth a look:

http://www.databasedev.co.uk/user_interface_designs.html

Hope this helped!