Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus Designing

So while most people spend their free time with family,Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, sports or relaxing; I like to make Access Databases. One of things I heard over and over during my years building apps for customers at M7 was; Access database are so ugly!!!! They look like windows 3.1 Design is an art and for myself I know function interests me much more than form. So as I put this database together I have been thinking about the tools I use to make Access apps look great and though I should share. Picking a color scheme Often times clients have a set of company colors but usually you one get one or two and sometimes none at all. I use this great website called Colour Lovers which allows designers to upload color schemes and rate/share them with the community. I picked this pallette for my application. Colour Lovers makes it really easy to create an application that has a consistent theme and takes the guesswork out of figuring out which colors go with which. The other cool thing you can do is is create a pattern based off the colors automatically .         Now that we have a color scheme I like to create a tiled background from my forms (Access 2007 feature). You can use any graphics program for this,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, I like Adobe Fireworks.  I always leave some room at the top (pattern) for my application title and create a nice little place for my navigation to sit. Since you are tiling you can make the image narrow (as wide as one pattern) but tall (I go 1000px) so that it doesn't repeat. This makes the image small so your app doesn't get bloated. It also makes it easy to lay regular elements on top (buttons,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, text boxes,Microsoft Office Professional 2010, labels) and keep them simple. Here is what the navigation is starting to look like. Next post I will talk about laying out your content,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, sub navigation and some easy ways to make search boxes look nicer. Oh and here is a sneak peek of what the whole application looks like so far. After I am finished we will be posting it as a template on Office Online. <div