Backgrounds

This is where you will notice the biggest difference in touch panel designs. The easiest way to create new templates is by using a solid white or grey background and then adding different colored buttons and slightly changing the accent graphics and offering the same template under a different name.

The exact opposite is true with our templates. There is usually one set of source pages that are used with every themed or colored background. Why? The button sets in our library are 32bit alpha transparent. In English, that means the buttons adapt to the background by absorbing some of the colors and image detail and the outside edges appear clean and sharp against any background.

The custom made backgrounds for our FlexTheme templates took almost a year to go from the concept and idea stage to a complete set of production ready images. We experienced a major setback when one of our main hard drives with 160+ GB of information, including all of the original layered FlexTheme images, had the drive motor lock up rendering all of the information on the hard drive useless. But sometimes you have to take a step back to take a huge step forward.

These are some of the original screen shots from the first series of FlexTheme concepts. You may notice they all had the same cream colored background in the source popup area and the source select buttons were the same on all but the "Vineyard", which is now known as Tuscany theme.

We realized that starting from scratch was the only option and it was decided that flexibility took precedence over style. The arched look was eliminated in favor of a rectangular popup area, leaving more room for buttons and additional graphic elements. The themed top menu buttons were nice but we needed a more elegant look and consistent feel. The long oval that housed the buttons along the top was traded for one that goes all the way across in case you need to add a couple of extra buttons. Every single aspect was re-analyzed and tested to ensure the best possible result. There are now 16 custom themes, 4 sports themes, and our Chameleon template that let's you use any background image for ultimate customization. Every template created since FlexTheme has the ability to use any background image.

Compare our designs to other templates that have borrowed our concept of multiple backgrounds and a fixed set of source and environmental control popup pages. Similar templates have arrived since the introduction of FlexTheme and we invite you to compare our designs to everyone else's before you make your purchase.

For an added bonus, we created a correctly sized set of FlexTheme borderless backgrounds that are included when you purchase any template. You can now theme any of our designs, in any resolution simply by changing the background image.

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Let's go to step 4 - Color