GUI beautification help.

[Raziaar]

Note: I don't know what the main mustard looking color will appear like on your guys monitor... On mine it looks fine, but I put it on the laptop and it looks more brown/orange

Hey guys... I was wondering if anyone out there has any experience in designing GUI's and making them appear attractive and most of all, usable.

This is a program I made. In my family whenever we get together we play the old board game Acquire all the time. We play it so much, that I decided I wanted to write a program for it because much of our time is consumed by figuring out how many stocks are worth what, and this sort of thing really speeds things up for the banker. And that's who uses this, the banker in the game. I wrote one for my brother's PDA, which worked out fine, but was really ugly and with the tiny screen, much different. Anyways, I decided to utilize the larger screen space I now have with the laptop my dad brought home from work which was discarded by the company. Nice little laptop.

So anyways, I made the program for it, and here's what I came up with. I am looking for suggestions on maybe how to make it look nicer? I made most of the decorations contour a bit to the style of Acquire board that me and my family play with.

I don't intend on anybody other than me or my family using this program, so I'm just being anal about getting it nicer for myself. I made all the graphics except the tiny program icon. Vegeta made that for me.

The voice thing... it detects the computer for TTS voices that are currently installed, and it will let you use those by selecting them via the help menu. The voice button basically reads back the purchase order in case anybody at the table is questioning the validity of what the banker is saying.

It reads it out like this, "Four Tower with eleven to twenty for seven-hundred, one Imperial with two for four-hundred with a grand total equaling thirty-two-hundred"

It basically strings up any of the available information that is able to be used for the final calculation price and reads it back in the TTS voice.

EDIT: Oh shit... I just realized that the chips have white paint and not black on the hotel tiles. Gah.

EDIT: Well, I don't think it looks as good with white, but that's what the game pieces look like, so pfft. The Letters beneath are still black though.

 

[lame-o]

Some ways to make it look better is to make your own font for it (although the board game uses pretty much the same font as you did, so I don't know), also draw borders and pictures in the same style as they were made on the board game's money cards. Kind of olden day style embroidery(?). I think it would also look nicer if you actually drew out an entire board for the player to use, but that would probably be hella hard.

EDIT: Also less windows style drop down lists.

 

[Raziaar]

Some ways to make it look better is to make your own font for it (although the board game uses pretty much the same font as you did, so I don't know), also draw borders and pictures in the same style as they were made on the board game's money cards. Kind of olden day style embroidery(?). I think it would also look nicer if you actually drew out an entire board for the player to use, but that would probably be hella hard.

EDIT: Also less windows style drop down lists.

I can't change the windows style drop down lists

I'd have to make my own controls to do that I believe, as I can't seem to find out how to modify that. Right now it's basically left up to the user's theme, and I use classic windows theme, that's why mine looks like that. Can't change the color on a few things which is driving me crazy, so in the future I might make my own controls. EDIT: Then again, maybe I can without making my own control. Have not really spent any time on application appearance in my studying of C#, just programming.

I would like to have an entire board made out so the banker if he wanted to could keep track of the game board(he plays too though) and have that board update all the information as well. But that's way involved and it would require a lot of planning, and it would be great for the base of a game version of it though, if I get everything working properly.

Need to get a hold of some of the cards and money from my uncle's too when I go over for thanksgiving, as I don't have any on hand to see the real up and close details. Hard to find them on the web. I wanted to utilize some of the card icons in there somewhere too.


Thanks for the suggestions!


EDIT: Hmm... Maybe I can check out Windows Presentation Foundation. I thought it was just for Vista, but apparently it's also for Windows XP which surprises me since I could have sworn before I read it was just for Vista.