Is there a style guide for GUI's somewhere?

Question

I'm looking for a style guide to unify Windows applications. I'd like it to contain stuff like "Always put dialog result buttons 5 pixels from the edge of the window"

I know Visual Studio helps me with this but I'm Delphi 7 at the moment (yeah I know).

Answer 1

Here's the User Experience Guide for Windows Vista. If you are developing for XP, you should be able to find that one as well.

EDIT 1: This appears to be the guide for XP.

EDIT 2: Following Andrew's post, this is the User Experience Guide for Windows 2000 and XP.

Answer 2

About usability I'd recommend Don't Make Me Think.

Answer 3

The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines may be what you are looking for.

I made a related post the other day regarding user interfaces on a related question.

Answer 4

Windows Vista: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

Apple: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/

More: Search keywords "windows usability"

Answer 5

Not so much a style guide, but Joel wrote a book called User Interface Design for Programmers a few years back. It's more about GUI design philosophy.

Answer 6

There are lots of guides:

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

Wikipedia: Human Interface Guidelines

Answer 7

Microsoft produce User Experience (UX) Guideline documentation for Windows XP and 2000, and Windows Vista

Both are full of information regarding conventions, including layout.

Answer 8

If you're still stuck with VCL7, I highly recommend you check out DevExpress' ExpressLayout Control. Whilst the product page pimps it as a user-focussed, layout management control, I've used it a lot to enforce layout standards.

Drop the control on a form & maximise it. Drop your controls onto it, group them appropriately (eg, a group for buttons at the bottom of a dialog) and the Layout Control looks after all the alignments: setting buttons in from the edge of the form, aligning text labels an input boxed, etc. It supports a few different layout styles, one of which is very Office-centric - making for some polished forms with very little effort (after you get used to the grouping concepts).

This may sound like spam, but I'm just a happy customer :)

Answer 9

Answer for the guestion in title: For browser look and feel, Oracle has a decent guide: BLAF (http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/blaf/index.html)

Although it's a few years old, the basics are still the same.

Answer 10

I'd also recommend Designing Interfaces. An excellent guide for different types of interface elements with plenty of examples and tips on appropriate uses.