Taming a wild layout — Part 4: Overdone effects

Posted by Paul Spafford on June 22, 2010 Leave a comment (0) Go to comments

Part 4 in my series of cleaning up the layout from my May 26, 2010 post is a pretty simple one. There are some inconsistent layout effects being applied. Have a look at the most recent version of the wild layout.

See the effect on all the fields and buttons. They all look to be three dimensional. Hey man, James Cameron spent a bajillion dollars on making Avatar three dimensional (and very little money on writers, but that’s not what this blog is about). If it’s good enough for him, why not go nuts?

Because it’s just wrong, dude, that’s why. Let’s shuffle off to Layout Mode and have a look. Make sure that in your View menu, the Formatting Bar is enabled. Here’s what it looks like:

On the far right side of it, you’ll see a pop-up menu called Effect. When you click on this, it gives you four options:

None: Do I really need to explain this one? It is the vacuum that is left behind when you haven’t selected one of the others.
Embossed: This makes the selected object look 3D, like it is raised up off the layout.
Engraved: This also makes the object 3D, but like it was dug into the layout.
Drop Shadow: This puts a shadow behind the object, like it is floating above the layout.

Now, if we select all the fields on this layout, we’ll see that they are all Embossed. That’s got to be confusing for the user. As a default behaviour, FileMaker embosses buttons and tab panels. Have you ever seen any other software with embossed fields for you to type in? Nay, brothers and sisters, it just doesn’t happen.

So, since you already have all the fields selected, let’s try something. Go over to the Effect pop-up menu on the toolbar, change it to say Engraved for these fields.

Okay, that is definitely an improvement. But really, that is soooooo ten years ago, girlfriend. Most of my favourite Web sites these days, have no effects on their fields. So let’s try that: Go to the Effect pop-up menu and select None.

Hmm. Looks cool to me. What do you think?

All right, then. The difference may be pretty subtle, but that’s okay: A whole lot of subtle can add up to a baseball bat to the side of the head in the finished product.

Let’s go back into Layout Mode now. The only effect that is a little goofy is that the buttons don’t all match. I like to leave the buttons with a slight embossed effect, so that it is more intuitive to push them.

You’ll notice that the Print button has a thicker border around it, making it look like it rises a little more off the layout. Come on now, those should all look the same.

First, select the find button, and look up at the “Line:” settings in the Formatting bar, it says “1 pt”. That means the line around that button is one point in thickness. Now we’ll select the Print button, and change its line thickness to be 1 pt.

Let’s have a last look in Browse Mode: