form design

[jlbantang]

normally we start application with login form and the idea of having the forum look consistent and have a neat image background impress our user. and im close to the deployment of my project w/ a problem where to get this neat login form background image...

im not a photo editor savvy so i preferred to used existing image for background.

can you provide images for free? please indicate link, thanks.

[si_the_geek]

Thread moved from Application Deployment forum, which is for questions about installing/distributing your software

[alex_read]

normally we start application with login form and the idea of having the forum look consistent and have a neat image background impress our user. and im close to the deployment of my project w/ a problem where to get this neat login form background image...

There are many pre-defined forms such as a splash screen or about dialog form which you can add into your project via the Add > New Item menu. These have standard, default images for you to use.

Alternatively you can enter "free wallpapers" into a search engine and use MS Word to crop these before copying and pasting into Paint if you wanted to avoid using tools such as Paint.Net or Photoshop.

If this is for a company application which is being passed onto or sold onto clients, then what about the possibility of asking everyone in your company if they have graphics experience or hiring a design shop as getting your company logo to appear professional would, I imagine, be well worth the spend.

[jlbantang]

sweet. thanx for the idea.

[CodedFire]

Well i tend to use a couple of images scaled down to size. Consider one of my applications login screen. I use stock images alot in my applications, be they photographic or grapphic. I use www.123rf.com as they allow me to only buy the images I need via a credit system. Anyway here is the login screen.

[jlbantang]

woW! this what a login screen should look like my current project is something like rating and report will be presented into graph chart... i was thinking to add charts in as bground in login... but i cant find a neat graph image..

[CodedFire]

Well consider what i said about 123rf.com. This is what i get when i type in graphs. http://www.123rf.com/search.php?word...emsperpage=100

You dont have to be an expert at graphics to crop them to your desired size. also if you like the swishes here is some examples: http://www.123rf.com/search.php?word=similar:588696

[CodedFire]

Design is also an iteritive process as this topic shows. (even i had to start somewhere!) http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=518314

[jlbantang]

great imgs. thanks. lotta selection

[chris128]

Alternatively you can enter "free wallpapers" into a search engine and use MS Word to crop these before copying and pasting into Paint if you wanted to avoid using tools such as Paint.Net or Photoshop.

Gotta ask, why would you copy and paste into Word to crop the image, then copy and paste that into Paint when you could just paste it straight into Paint and crop it in there?

[RobDog888]

Nice idea of using a Splash screen to double as a login screen.
In the about menu of your app you could redisplay the splash screen and hide the login boxes.

Dont forget that in a business environment your color display resolution may be less then optimal. So high res graphics may look lame with only limited colors available.

[chris128]

Nice idea of using a Splash screen to double as a login screen.
In the about menu of your app you could redisplay the splash screen and hide the login boxes.

Dont forget that in a business environment your color display resolution may be less then optimal. So high res graphics may look lame with only limited colors available.

so true! I recently spent ages making a nice GUI for an application that would be run on servers at work... only to find that when using Remote Desktop to connect to the servers the colour quality etc gets notched down quite a bit so most parts of the app looked nothing like they did when I designed them

[RobDog888]

Yea I had that happen to me before which is why I mentioned it

Terminal server sessions usually are low res like 256 colors where companies are large or are having bandwidth/resource issues.