Archive for February, 2010

GUI Design Studio 4.0 Preview – Part 2:
Custom Elements and Templates

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Version 4.0 PreviewGUI Design Studio version 4.0 includes new “Custom Elements” and “Templates”. These complement Components and Libraries already in GUI Design Studio.

They’re simple but they can make a big difference to your productivity by cutting out a huge amount of repetitive work, keeping consistency with house styles and helping you to create designs faster.

Custom Elements

Any folder within the Project tree can be assigned to be a Custom Element Folder. The folder icon then changes to indicate its new status. This is also applied to all of its sub-folders.

Custom Elements Folder

Now, you can create Custom Element designs within the folder and any existing GUI design that you want to be used as a Custom Element can be dragged into it.
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Posted in GUI Design Studio, Releases | 1 Comment »

Styling Calendar Controls
- Are 33 colour options enough or too many?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Version 3.6 of GUI Design Studio included a new element for creating Calendar controls.

When we started designing this feature, we looked around for examples of different calendars in desktop and web applications. We found a wide range of different designs; some with one month, some with 3 or 4, some highlighting “today”, others highlighting a particular day or a range of days. Of course, each application had quite a different visual design to its calendars as well.

In the past, we’ve tried to simplify elements and minimize the number of settings and options they have but, with this new element, we felt we had to provide for the increasing demand on design flexibility.

The problem, as all of you designers of great user interfaces will know, is that with flexibility comes complexity. We didn’t want to give you a tool which is hard to learn or slow to use because it has so many options and special cases, but we did want to give you a tool which will let you create the calendar design you need, quickly and simply.
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Posted in Articles, Example Designs, GUI Design Studio, Usabilty, User Interface Design | 1 Comment »