Artistic Design

[tmyers]

How do you some of you design your forms?
I am not a creative person whatsoever. As a result I used datasheet view in a lot of places. Where I didn't, I think my forms look pretty cruddy

 

[Gasman]

I think about how I would want to use it. I've done a fair bit of admin work in my time and worked on what I thought were systems that had just been designed with no thought on their efficient use.
I rarely make then 'pretty', more functional, but then I am not a professional developer.

I'll give you an example of a web form.
Want to book a flight, the date of departure defaults to today. fair enough, but I select Feb next year. Then I select the return date. What do I get?, you've guessed it, today's date? Drives me around the bend.

When I worked for Lloyds bank, one of the senior people createda DB for us. The combos were all over the shop. the first entry we needed to record was at the bottom, the second somewhere above, the third, well somewhere. No thought to the phases we had to record.

I myself have been guilty of it. I created a DB also for Lloyds Bank and two of the controls were SortCode and Account number.
These came in separately from an Excel workbook and accordingly shown as separate controls on a form. However to use in the banks mainframe system one had to use sortcode and account number as one string, which meant two copy and pastes.

One of my colleagues asked if they could have one field with both concatenated, and I apologised and said I should have realised that myself.
The key result here was that I could amend it immediately, with a little testing and did so.

 

[tmyers]

I think about how I would want to use it. I've done a fair bit of admin work in my time and worked on what I thought were systems that had just been designed with no thought on their efficient use.
I rarely make then 'pretty', more functional, but then I am not a professional developer.

I'll give you an example of a web form.
Want to book a flight, the date of departure defaults to today. fair enough, but I select Feb next year. Then I select the return date. What do I get?, you've guessed it, today's date? Drives me around the bend.

When I worked for Lloyds bank, one of the senior people createda DB for us. The combos were all over the shop. the first entry we needed to record was at the bottom, the second somewhere above, the third, well somewhere. No thought to the phases we had to record.

This is the approach I have tried to maintain. Keep all my controls in order with the "flow". Makes no sense for your "first" control to be something that isn't needed until step 5.

 

[Gasman]

This is the approach I have tried to maintain. Keep all my controls in order with the "flow". Makes no sense for your "first" control to be something that isn't needed until step 5.

I've added to my post since.

 

[isladogs]

I suggest using a common style on all forms - same colour scheme / same font etc.
Make sure the colours are 'easy on the eye'.
Use a form header & footer with the same colour scheme.
Also try to maintain as similar layout as possible on all forms with e.g. a Close button on the top right and a Print button to the left of that.

Suggest using a continuous form instead of a datasheet to improve the appearance.
I would also recommend using overlapping windows display option rather than tabbed documents.
And, as already suggested, ensure the tab order matches the data flow

I spent several years refining a form layout which, in my opinion, works well.
As a result, I now reuse the same form design in all my applications

 

[Pat Hartman]

I happen to like datasheets. So unless I need to put thinks like buttons or option groups on a subform, I default to DS. This gives the user a spreadsheet experience which they're comfortable with and great searching/sorting options that I don't have to code.

When using color, think less rather than more and soft rather than dark.
Keep the fonts on the dark side, I HATE web pages with fashionably pale fonts. I can't read them.
Put the controls in a logical order. If the users are doing data entry from a form, try to maintain that field order.
As you move controls around, don't forget to reset the tab order to keep the tab order "natural"
Don't present gratuitous messages. You don't want to train your users to say "yes" to popup and that's what happens if you confirm, confirm, confirm or constantly display messages. You want them to actually read the messages you pop up rather than click them away.

Pick a theme and use that on all forms. Keep in mind that changing from one theme to another isn't necessarily transparent because they tend to have different point sizes and that messes up your labels and control sizes.

Personally, I prefer windows rather than the 2007 tab view. I close (or hide) a form if i open another.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I google "access forms examples" and look at the images for inspiration.

 

[Gasman]

Don't present gratuitous messages. You don't want to train your users to say "yes" to popup and that's what happens if you confirm, confirm, confirm or constantly display messages. You want them to actually read the messages you pop up rather than click them away.

Years ago, i wrote a small system on Burroughs computers. they I seem to recall had a Go button (like a Return) that committed the keystrokes.
I coded in a message to confirm the record could be saved.
A few weeks later I had to go to the factory and I watched the data entry people. When it came to the end of the data entry, they just gave a double tap. once for the end and once for my message, they did not even look at it.

I told them that I would go back and with confirmation from their employers, i would remove the confirmation message, as it was just slowing them down. :-(

 

[Pat Hartman]

I learned the same lesson gasman, also years ago. When you inundate users with "status" and "warning" messages, they just blow by all of them without even reading. So they miss important messages. If a user group is afraid of automatic saves, I add a save button to the form and sometimes a cancel button. The save button sets a variable to True. The Current event of the form sets the variable to False Then the Form's BeforeUpdate event checks the variable. If it is True, the user pressed the save button and so wants to save so I allow the validation to continue. If the variable is False, I prompt the user "Do you want to save" with vbYesNoCancel and depending on what the answer is, I save, exit without saving, Ie use Me.Undo to back out all changes or Cancel to return to the dirty form without saving. Make sure the message is clear as to what action will happen in each case. I double prompt for exit without saving because I will be erasing data that they entered and I want to give them a second chance. The AfterUpdate event of the form sets the variable to False so that if they want to make a second change, they need to press save again.

 

[SurreyNick]

As you gave the title of your thread "Artistic Deign" I thought I'd throw in a few suggestions.

Have you heard of wireframing? This is a technique used in the development of websites and applications. A wireframe often serves as the first stage of design and a good one gives you a vision for the entire layout and function of an app/website along with the overall structure the various pages take and how navigation flows in those pages and between them. This technique can be easily and usefully employed on a db too.

Complimentary to this is your design style guide, where you define specific attributes (creative style sheets, font types and sizes, colour combinations etc. etc.) which are then applied repeatedly in your app/website.

Of course this is all usually done long before starting work on a front end. But if you are still in the early stages of your development and are anxious to invest time and effort in the design elements of your db then you wouldn't be wasting your time to study these things. No need to buy books or go on courses, there's plenty of wonderful guidance on the web.

 

[davegri]

Here's a free Access app that will allow you to customize the colors of all the forms in your DB in a consistent fashion. This can save you literally dozens of hours over trying to modify a bunch of forms manually. The app has 70 preset schemes that you can modify (if you don't like the presets).
People seem to like it - over 700 downloads.

Forum won't let me post URL link, so here's a string:
"accessforums.net/showthread.php?t=58464"

 

[Gasman]

Here's a free Access app that will allow you to customize the colors of all the forms in your DB in a consistent fashion. This can save you literally dozens of hours over trying to modify a bunch of forms manually. The app has 70 preset schemes that you can modify (if you don't like the presets).
People seem to like it - over 700 downloads.
"accessforums.net/showthread.php?t=58464"

Thank you Dave
For the ease of others accessforums.net/showthread.php?t=58464#5