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

Buttons - Spacing - Backgrounds - Color - Fit & Finish

Step 2 - 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.

When we created our larger versions of FlexTheme for the 15" and 17" touch panels, every single graphic from the image library was resized and placed in the correct position to exactly match the dimensions and buttons spacing of the smaller resolution templates.

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Below are the climate and Satellite Radio pages from our FlexTheme 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.