Save your Work in Business and Financial Software

Business and accounting tools up until now used to have Spartan, decidedly minimalistic user interfaces. This approach worked in the early days of text-based spreadsheets and black-and-white trading terminals. However, the latest trends in operating system and software design require a better, more usable and more visually appealing user interface. Is your team of designers prepared for the challenge?

Designing clear text messages, wizards and intuitive dialogs and window layout is only one side of a coin. It is still easy to spoil a good user interface with improperly designed, rushed graphics, with alternatives being spending more on graphic design or moving the deadline. There is another, less talked about alternative: using ready-made stock graphics to empower your accounting product or service.

What's so good about stock images? Stock images are a great way to make your product stand out with professional, balanced design and strikingly good looks. Stock graphics are readily available, meaning that you see exactly what you get, and you get it right away without the long wait. Stock icons are sold as matching sets, ensuring color and stylistic integrity of your project. Finally, stock icons are a much less expensive alternative to drawing icons even in-house, let alone outsourcing them to a contractor.

Working specifically on making a usable tool for business-oriented customers, you need stock images designed with that in mind. While there are many generic sets of icons available, there are only a few designed for business developers. Business Toolbar Icons by Perfect Icon (perfecticon.com) are hand-crafted by professional software designers for the purpose of integration with business and accounting software.

Business Toolbar Icons depict many objects, actions and symbols that are widely used in financial tools. Currencies such as Green Dollar and Euro, accounting terms such as Debit and Capital Gain, actions such as Forward, Down, Pick and Transfer, and human-related icons such as Staff, Employee and Administrator are supplied among many other images.

Technically speaking, your purchase gets over 200 icons in all standard sizes, color depths and file formats. Semi-transparent True Color images for Windows XP and Vista operating systems with high resolution displays are complemented with 8-bit, 256-color images. Each picture comes in all resolutions of 16x16, 20x20, 24x24, 32x32, and 48x48 dots, and is supplied in three different states: normal, disabled, and highlighted. All images are available in Windows Icon (ICO), Bitmap (BMP), GIF, and PNG file formats.