Dashboard Design using Microsoft PaintBrush

Designed Dashboard

Today was a difficult day in the office. In the morning I was asked to complete my graph controls, I’ve talked about them in my June 08, 2006 post "Bar Chart and Line Chart (Info)". But soon, my boss came back and asked me to design the dashboard interface as we have to send the snapshots of the dashboard to the client for verification.

The graph controls were not yet complete to be used in the application and complete the dashboard interface by the evening. So, I had to design the interface using some drawing tool. I asked for Photoshop (Adobe), I am comfortable with that. But, I was told that we do not have licensed version of Photoshop, and I was not allowed to install the trial version on my machine.

I have to fall back on the image editor provided by Microsoft with Windows, i.e. MSPaint, huh.

I worked hard, modified every pixel individually, used the line, box, ellipse functions of MSPaint to draw the dashboard. At the end of the day, what I had done is here.
The original image is a bitmap file (BMP, to preserve the image quality) it is 2.25 MB. You can have a look at the original file here (2.25MB)


A thumbnail in JPG format is shown below (111kb)




After completing the dashboard interface, I am convinced with the powers of MSPaint.

As the paintbrush does not have feature to generate gradient and it is a lot time consuming to generate gradient by modifying the colour of every pixel, I created a utility to help me complete the dashboard design
- Gradient Maker

Click on the link above to download the utility.

My other utilities are available here.