Interface Design / Field Outlines pt. 2
Subtitles of the Movie
So here's a good time to discuss what colors you should have for your fonts and your backgrounds. So I like to choose a neutral color you can see for things that aren't that important. I'm not saying that this doesn't look good here, this 3-D interface, but it's not as important as this tab right here, this bar. It draws your attention. So try to use less colors and when you're going with text, you don't want to use black background with white text or some kind of colored text. I usually want to stick with something very straightforward and easy for the eye to understand. Things that people are used to, like looking in a newspaper. They usually have black text on a white background. So I highly recommend you do that. I'm not saying you can't do that in exceptional cases, but generally speaking, it's going to be a lot easier to comprehend for the person when they see this. So when they look at this, they instantly see oh, there's a this little engraved section. I can click into that. It must be somewhere I can edit. This doesn't. I don't edit there. So you want to use these visual clues to make things obvious for people. One last thing I want to do is when I click into this, I want to make sure that everything selects there. I just kind of like that feature that if somebody clicks in it, they can type right over it. You may not want to do this. It's up to you. Just double click on the field and, oops, not that one. That would be the option field setup. We want actually behavior and we want it select entire contents of field when entered. click OK, go to browse, click undo it and you see how it highlight nicely when you click into it? I really like that effect. But now what we need to do is make this field all the way across the whole interface. So we're going to take this, we'll adjust it where we want it. Looks like that's perfect. And then we'll duplicate. One, two, three, four, five, six. Move it down a little bit so you get it just the right amount of spacing and then I'm going to smart duplicate. So command D, or control D. And don't worry about how many you get here. Just put a whole bunch. Then all you have to do is come back and double click on it and change it to the next field you want. So let's say you want first name next. So we come into name first, click OK, then double click on this and type in first name. Go down to the next one, double click on it, change it to last name. There you go. And then type in last name. And so what you want to do here is replicate what I'm doing here with all your fields because I don't want to take you through this tedious task because it's going to take a while. But go through each one and set these fields up exactly how you want it and then add your shipping fields as well so they're side by side here. So spend a little bit of time and when we come back offline I'm going to do the same thing so we can see what the results are.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 9: Intermediate |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 33823 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-30-5 |
| Release Date: | 2007-11-13 |
| Duration: | 10.5 hrs / 130 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | For Online University members only |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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