SuperCollider GUI Design Guidelines

From SuperCollider wiki

While the designer is invited to be free and create, a few guidelines have been established:

[edit] Stylistic requirements

• Elegant, minimal, precise, readable, high contrast
• No mad chrome, spaceship controls, excessive fake 3D, or that fake car radio look you see on Windows MP3 players.
• We wish to avoid the currently popular totally flat 2D style that has become very common in Audio software: Ableton, TouchOSC, Reaktor
• A slight 3D/raised look would be ideal, giving some sense of tactile controls.
• OS neutral : not referencing or emulating the look of any of the operating systems (Cocoa/Aqua/Vista/XP)
• Default design of the controls should be color-neutral (apart from minor elements like focus banding, selected text)
• The controls will be style-able by users (colors, font, dimensions) so the design should not rely on strong primary colors.
• The above implies that edge detail, elegant 3D (drop shadows, fading), and proportion are the primary aspects to be designed (but then again we aren't experts in this)
• Note that sliders, buttons and knobs are size-able so the design needs to be implementable in a way that the edges can stretch

[edit] Suggestions, ideas to play with and aesthetic opinions

• We associate ourselves stylistically more with projects like Processing and Max/PD than with commercial music software
• The science-lab look of precision is a fetish we are fond of, but we want to look pretty too
• More than one Slider(Fader) class may exist. One with calibration markings on them would be great
• Programmers may add custom bitmaps as backgrounds to Sliders and Knobs.  

( If this doesn't fit with the design then a separate Slider/Knob class can be made that does and whose chrome won't conflict and also allows a bitmap for the handle )

[edit] Discussion

A thread with discussion within the development community about the project can be read here Advice and opinions on the project gratefully accepted. Feel free to directly email anybody on the development list involved in the discussion.

Other Applications (to envy or avoid)

Example screenshots showing the current SuperCollider GUI can be found on the Wikipedia