Design question re: Date Picker - displaying dates in next/previous months in current month's grid

[Anastasia Cheetham]

On 3-Feb-09, at 2:53 PM, Allison Bloodworth wrote:

> 3) We haven't come up with a great design solution to strongly  
> distinguish non-selectable dates (e.g. when entering a Due Date for  
> an assignment, dates *before* the Open Date shouldn't be selectable)  
> and dates in the previous month.

In some date pickers I've seen that distinguish between pickable and  
non-pickable dates (e.g. hotel room availability), the distinction is  
made with green and red coloured backgrounds. I've always found that  
to be pretty obvious, given our existing common associations with  
those colours. They could probably be combined with grey vs. black  
foreground colours for the month distinctions? You'd probably have to  
play with shading, etc., and I do see that you already use background  
colours to distinguish weekdays from weekends, but maybe it's an idea  
to start with?

-- 
Anastasia Cheetham                   a.cheetham at utoronto.ca
Software Designer, Fluid Project    http://fluidproject.org
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre / University of Toronto