A Design Question For Professional Developers

[CaliKidd]

This is a subjective question, so please don't flame me. It is a serious query. I am going by the "there are no dumb questions" rule for newbies, so here it goes.

My question concerns the use of colors in form design, specifically the use of the .forecolor, .backcolor, .font, .bordercolor, and .picture properties.

Have you or someone you know ever designed applications for customers using colored forms?
If so, was the customer's reaction favorable, unfavorable or neutral?
Is the use of color considered (in the trade) to be unprofessional or cheesy?

I understand that using wild, loud colors or overdoing anything could be viewed as amateurish. I'm not going there. My question is more along the lines of using more conservative, business-like colors and themes. In a world of techies, is any artistic expression allowed?

The reason I ask is because it seems that almost every software package I've ever purchased or installed over the past 20 years uses the standard grey background and buttons with black text. I rarely ever see any deviation from that, so I didn't know if it was an "unwritten rule" in the programming and development biz... or if it was just a case of "that's the way it's always been done" from back in the Win 3.x (or earlier) days when the palette was 16 colors or less. Heck, even the old dial-up modem BBS's used to use more color on their screens!

 

[Smitty]

You might even be restricted to what colours, fonts etc you can use by 'corporate policy'.

Holy Crap! I can only imagine what Yahoo forms look like - They've got that **** purple slapped all over Silicon Valley.

 

[CaliKidd]

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate your opinions. I guess it's just me, but I find it somewhat fascinating because it kind of delves into the psychology of computing and how people may prefer to relate to their work.

We run our monitors at the highest, 32-bit, 64 million color resolution, but then we want to only use 3: black, white, and grey. We seem to be conditioned like Pavlov's dog to look and act a certain way at work. And then we wonder why we feel repressed, frustrated, disempowered and bored with our jobs.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
Yet, as soon as work is over, we'll quickly jump into our painted cars with their colorful dash displays so we can get home to our personally decorated dwellings so we can enjoy watching our favorite high-definition color TVs until we fall asleep.

Then, we wake up and start all over again! The irony of it all...
<?xml:namespace prefix = v ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" /><v:shapetype id=_x0000_t75 stroked="f" filled="f" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" oreferrelative="t" o:spt="75" coordsize="21600,21600"><v:stroke joinstyle="miter"></v:stroke><v:formulas><v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"></v:f><v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"></v:f><v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"></v:f></v:formulas><vath o:connecttype="rect" gradientshapeok="t" o:extrusionok="f"></vath><o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"></o:lock></v:shapetype><o></o>
Drawing the line between what is/is not acceptable seems is a slippery slope. What may be OK for one person can have the other running away. It's no wonder we default to the lowest common denominator: no colors.