Design 101

Design 101 - A quick tour of what goes into our touch panel designs

Spacing

Our goal with any design is to use as much of the touch panel as possible while leaving enough space between groups of buttons and the physical edges of the touch screen to give the template a well balanced look and feel. Many designers offer touch panels for larger resolutions like 1280 x 768 simply borrowing the buttons from a smaller resolution template. You can easily identify the shortcuts that are taken by looking at the amount of unused space on a touch panel. Most often, the buttons from their 800 x 600 template were simply cut and pasted into the 1024 x 768 version. Below (left) is an actual example of a commercially available touch panel template that uses the cut and paste approach when porting a design from an 800 X 600 template to a 1280 X 768. In our opinion, there is no reason to upgrade a client from a 15" to a 17" panel if the extra space is not being used. You can also see the source popup is drastically out of proportion with the physical edges of the screen.

When we create the large resolution versions of our templates for 15" and 17" touch panels, every single graphic from the image library is resized and placed in the correct position to exactly match the dimensions and buttons spacing of the smaller resolution templates. In the example at the above right, we utilize the extra width of the screen for room specific static menus such lighting, weather or HVAC controls. The source popup area to the left contains correctly resized buttons from the 800 X 600 version so the ratios are exactly the same. Some templates have tabbed menus that force you to select the 0-9 keypad, transports, and other menu items on large resolution panels, which is completely unnecessary and makes it much harder for clients or house guests to understand.

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Below are the Blu Ray and XBOX360 pages from our Versa template. The negative space between the buttons and the additional elements is symmetrical and balanced. You will notice that certain button groups with similar functions like the 0-9 keypad or the climate main buttons are closer together but there is equal space separating each group which lessens the chance of accidental buttons presses. We consider every detail when designing professional touch panel templates.

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Let's go to step 3 - Backgrounds

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