O1B wrote:Don't be sorry; be Constructive.
Tumble wrote:I'm sorry, but that GUI is completely nauseating.
O1B wrote:
What's not to like?
Are you the developer? I'll see if I can explain some of the things that immediately jump out at me as aesthetic issues.
The controls don't seem to be arranged in any particular order. There are beveled outlines that appear to split it into sections, but they don't always correspond to functionality. Reverb is split across three different sections on the left, with voice polyphony, mod/pitch wheels, and an "imager" knob arbitrarily placed alongside them. The buttons to enable reverb and delay are nowhere near the most important controls for those effects. If you have a bunch of controls that all affect a single thing, you'll usually want to visually group them together. Assuming that the user will read (more or less) from left to right and top to bottom is also helpful, both in arranging the controls for each group, and in determining where to position the groups in relation to each other, and what to make larger or smaller. What are the most important controls for shaping the sound? I can't really tell right now.
The fonts aren't antialiased and have jaggy edges. Antialiasing would look more appealing, and also more consistent with other Reason rack devices. If you want to use a font without antialiasing for the patch-selection display, make sure to scale it so that it doesn't display uneven scaling artifacts when drawn at the standard Reason rack size. (The current font looks like it has, at the least, kerning issues caused by uneven scaling and/or lack of antialiasing.) I think there are a couple of standard fonts for the patch selection displays in Reason. Using one of those would be the easiest way to make it look right.
The beveling around edges looks very awkward and unnatural, both due to the shapes used and the blurry 'pillowish' appearance of the highlights and shadows. The worst offenders are the cable/plug coming from the MIDI light, and the r-shaped indents to the sides of the HP and LP knobs, but this applies to many of the other pieces as well. They end up looking more like filtered blobs than real materials.
The fully-saturated cyan, green, and magenta make for an unappealing combination. Cyan, green, and magenta can work well together, but would look better with different hue and saturation values picked by an expert with an eye for color. Generally the more colors you're using together, the more of a challenge it will be to make them work together appealingly. There also seems to be some inconsistency in what each color represents -- sometimes purple and green are used to signify high pass and low pass, respectively, but other times those colors are used for entirely different things. As a result, it looks like a random jumble of cyan, green, magenta, and gray. For this device, you would probably be best off using just the neutral gray plus a single highlight color, rather than three.
There's a bunch of wasted space in the middle from the giant MIDI light thing(?), and other parts could probably be rearranged to take up less space. Take a close look at how similar functionality has been set up in the stock Reason devices, there are lots of good examples.
I hope some of this advice is helpful!
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