Help on interface

can someone please give me ideas or teach me on how to make borders for images like the one in this thread from the creator. I have an interface i wanna make but i dont now how to make a nice border for it. Here's a little backdrop information on the interface.

it's like you just unearthed a rusty old alien ship or some sort of mainframe that was burried for a long time and is rusting over. I have some parts that look futureistic yet old and dingy. I dont wana take the "future" category too far because many people use it (which isn't a bad thing, but i wanna do something new)

i have the menu on the left and i am making a rusty texture (maybe green rust. i mean. it was originally green metal but now it's rusted over)

yeah.. so.. i think i got my idea across (MAN I WISH I HAD A SCANNER TO SHOW U WHAT I MEANT!!) any kind of help for a border of some sort would be great. THANKS!!

well u could just take the rust effect ur gonna use on the metal and use it to make a control-panel thing that the text would be displayed on.. then at the top u could put some alien simbols..

also for ur interface u could use the alien simbol <( is that how u spell it? ) and when the person puts the mouse-over it morphs to english..


well just my $.02

I assume your native language isn't english so I'll help you out. It's spelled symbol. If you are ever in doubt you can always use the spell check but that can be confusing unless you know english pretty well. It's my native language and I constantly have problems with it so don't feel bad.

As for the border I agree with the rust idea. I also like the idea of the alien roll-overs too. The only thing that would be confusing about using "alien symbols" is knowing what goes where. So you may want to try and change some understood symbols so that the look like they are from another planet. Use the roll-overed image to make it very clear where it goes.

yeah its not my native language

i guess the alien symbols would be a little confusing but it would go well with the rest of the interface....i mean its up to him but if it was mine i would do it that way.

i got menu on left and at the bottom is attached to a metal frame that is connected to a flash animation in the middle of the page which continues to the right and i have some kind of (tube, or cylendrical vile filled with green goo or what have you, done in flash) and that goes up and i have a flash animation on top of that which pretends to be reading diagnostics from the 'tube'.

NOTE: those flash animations are extremely small. even smaller than the size of a normal .gif at 100X100 so dont worry about any kind of lag in loading.

i need something at the very top to connect the diagnostics "reader" and the menu bar.

they're about 13 k each.

According to Jacob Nielsen, usabillity expert, all available navigation options should be visible to the user at all times (therefore, it would not be helpful to have to roll over each alien symbol to find out where it leads!) just my thoughts...

the anarchymage

Jacob Nielson also thinks that every web site should look exactly the same and only the content should change. I don't hear anyone going around broadcasting that though. He's highly overrated.

??

Jakob Nielson is an overrated ego-maniac who claims to be the ultimate guru when it comes to web interface design and site usability. He charges like $100,000 to come speak to web designers and stuff. He has a book out, and is the author of http://www.useit.com (if he thinks the entire internet should look like HIS site, we might as well all just throw our computers in the trash bin right now, because it looks like crap, and is still confusing to navigate). Anyway, I agree with that one point though, that it's kind of a pain to have to move your mouse around the page just to see where you can go.