It is always impressive to palpate a of course "slick" user interface. A truly graphical user interface (Gui) should of course be pleasant and fascinating at first sight. Not all that many years ago we were article with electronic devices with cryptic displays that had minuscule to no graphics; we just wanted the new, novel gadget to be functional.
But, as time has pushed us forward, our society has come to be well-known with, and, it is quite clear, dependent upon embedded electronic devices such as cell phones, personal assistants, and your cordial automotive dashboard. "Functional" is no longer enough.
In the world of the desktop computer it is unheard of to not have a "pretty" graphical user interface. In the world of embedded devices pretty Guis (pronounced "Gooeys") had been harder to come by. However, the end product audience, you and I, no longer accept a mediocre display on our technological wonders. (We certainly don't in our games, but that is a whole other story!)
Fortunately, some vendors in the embedded gadget market had seen that there was not only a need to help descriptive designers and engineers work more closely together in the embedded product design world, but that there was an confident merger of the two disciplines. One such company in the embedded Gui market, Tilcon, has recently introduced a new version of their Gui design system that substantially reduces the time it takes to make a expert and pretty Gui.
In the embedded graphics world there is the idea of a "virtual" interface. A display, for instance, on the dashboard of your car, might show several meters showing speed and tachometer readings, a bar graph for temperature, a range of "idiot" lights and even touch-screen controlled buttons. You are shown data in real-time as it is communicated to the display from the many microprocessors throughout the vehicle.
These entities used to be real corporeal entities, and now they are painted on the screen by the Gui system. In the Gui world these virtual objects are called "widgets." These "widgets" are painstakingly crafted by descriptive artists to appear as real as possible.
Every embedded product Gui design is finally a work of aesthetics. To sell in a competitive world, the gadget must fit into the flow of the broad product team's conceptual goals. Ordinarily the Gui team creates a "basic" widget set and then has to painstakingly work with personel artistic renderings to write code to recreate the image, or possibly to import every photo and element. By anyone process, it is no small feat.
Tilcon has elevated the efficiency of the embedded Gui design process to a new level with its modern Adobe Photoshop integration. In the Tilcon Gui system, a basic set of widgets are supplied as standard. The embedded designer plainly drags and drops the desired widgets on the screen as needed. Once the screen design is complete, the user plainly hits the export button and out pops a Photoshop file. This file creates all the layers needed by a Photoshop-based designer to begin the artistic process of "branding" and creating the desired look and feel of the end product.
The fascinating part of this process, for those of you that are well-known with Photoshop, is that every particular widget object is exported into its own "layer," and the layers are laid out in Photoshop "groups." If a "button" widget has one image when "on" and another for "off," each state will have its own layer created. This Psd file is delivered directly to the descriptive designer. The artist goes to work in parallel with the embedded Gui engineer. Every particular item can be hand crafted inside the Adobe toolset, and upon completion, the final file is delivered to the engineer, who plainly imports the new look by pushing an "import" button. Suddenly, the screen is gorgeous!
Perhaps even more importantly, the engineer has prolonged his work unimpeded using just the basic widgets. Team productivity is enhanced. product supervision is happy. The sales team will love the new expert appearance of the end result.
The implications of the time savings that this process represents to product design teams are obvious. What might not be so confident on first inspection is how rapidly a team can "re-skin" its product look, or "custom-brand" the product for its own end customers. The result: a product design team has faster access to great-looking displays, can use the same gadget for several different end customer's needs and can deliver a custom appearance for each such buyer with much greater ease and time savings. Now, that's worth seeing!
Embedded Gui construct - Photoshop Can Help
