Look & Feel Development
A look and feel designed by ERGOSIGN ensures your market position in three ways: a professional appearance, high differentiation and superior recognition value. The development of a distinct look and feel is supported nowadays by various technologies.
Tailored to your Application
In a custom look & feel, the standard interaction components, like window borders, menus and buttons, are redesigned with your corporate design guidelines in mind. In addition, different look and feel variations can be used as market or client specific skins.
Klaus Schulte, Tenovis
Interestingly, the development of a custom look and feel is usually not time intensive. Almost all modern technologies offer standard tools for the efficient production of individual skins. ERGOSIGN delivers complete look and feels for these technologies that are ready to use after adjusting only a few lines of code.
Development for Standard Platforms
ERGOSIGN designs and develops look and feels for all major platforms:
Silverlight/WPF
ERGOSIGN creates user interfaces for WPF and Silverlight applications. The description of the user interface is done in the declarative markup language XAML.
We develop the respective resources, styles and templates following the guidelines of a custom look and feel. These can be used directly by your developers. (See the CAS case study.)
Windows Forms
ERGOSIGN creates look & feels in DevExpress for Windows Forms. This enables complex interaction components such as ribbons (Microsoft Office 2010) to be styled quickly.
We also support the development of look and feels for IDEs that offer skinning of interaction components like CodeJock or Infragistics. (See the Addison case study.)
Java
Starting with Java version 1.5, the look and feel engine Synth can be used to develop independent interface elements. Jyloo Synthetica further improved this engine and added elements like transparency and animations.
In addition, we provide customization of the extended Jyloo SwingX components. (See the Scheidt & Bachmann case study.)
Qt / C++
Nokia QT offers a cross-platform and cross-media environment for the development of C++ applications. Since the release of version 4, skinning of most of the interaction elements is possible on the basis of cascading style sheets (CSS).
This feature simplifies the development of a unique appearance and increases its reusability. (See the RTT case study.)
AIR / Flash / Flex
These comparatively young technologies by Adobe still involve many changes between releases (CSS support or Catalyst).
However the advantages of cross-platform compatibility and perfect online integration justify exploring their potential for skinning. (See the Goalscape case study.)
HTML / CSS / AJAX
ERGOSIGN has wide-ranging experience in the design and development of user interfaces for browser based clients using HTML, CSS and Javascript.
We provide style sheets that are optimized for reusability. Particularly in combination with modern Javascript frameworks, there is a lot of potential to be tapped. (See the ABAS case study.)
Other Technologies
We are also happy to offer our support if you use some other technology or would like to develop a look and feel yourselves. In these cases, we deliver all the assets required for integration and provide your developers with detailed style definitions for reference in future implementations.