THe GlOW around the text makes things feel out of focuse.

yes but it's kind of mandatory on a translucid windows header or you couldn't read the text at all.

Building Your First TaskDialog (Part 2) Jeff Miller - September 20, 2006 Hello, and welcome back to the

@admin: No. Its just bad design. Good design would be to place a white reflection in the upper left corner (like the unnessecary one on the left border). Clouds are always bad ;-)

I agree - less blur and more of a white reflection to make the text stand out. If you keep the blur, just make it a few pixels but up the contrast on it.

Wouldn't a fade towards black and white text be better? Or an alpha-channel gradient?

I sure hope this stuff is adequately skinnable, because I would like to properly play with it.

absloutly NO.

design it from groundup again

The blur really is something like a designer's last resort, or one of the first things you play with when you open up Photohop for the first time. There are more elegant, subtle ways to do this.

I agree with the blur/glow comments. Ditch 'em.

[sarcasm]

Vista might as well have an HDR-enabled GUI to add blooming effects on everything.

[/sarcasm]

Seriously, I hope there's a disable/alternate GUI option.

Why the text on title is black. I think, since it is a title the text should be observable. For this purpose, I would set the TextColor to White, add a 1 Pixel aliased Black out stroke and a very little shadow. The result can be seen here:

http://www.codres.de/pics/sampletaskdialog.jpg

^ Job well done!  I knew someone could chime in on this design with something useful.  So simple, but the result makes a huge difference.

My personal opinion is that showing such a level of transparency on the border is pretty ugly. It makes the window content looking like floating as a separate entity. The window border and the content should go together so they need to look consistent.

I think that is the big problem with this form. This is much observable when we cut the form (as in this example) and place it on a paper.

The border will look like the background.

Imagine a huge amount of documentation, presenting such ugly cuts from the user interface.