[sdiy] Designing front panels for synths

[Liam Wall]

Ok, a third attempt to reply to this thread, this time with a correct email
address and images that are not obnoxiously huge :-)

I'm sure this is not a controversial view, but I think _usability_ and
_aesthetics_ are separate objectives and it is possible to have one without
the other, and the hard thing is to have both.

As long as something is laid out in a legible and usable format, for me,
just the font, knob, and colour choices go a long way for the aesthetics.

For my techy non-designer skills, I'm pretty happy with my latest FPD
attempt aesthetically, and I think I'll reuse that font/colours again.

But the clarity leaves something to be desired still: I dont think the
visual association between the labels and the things they're labelling is
strong enough, nor what that scale knob is scaling (answer: both cv and
ping inputs). But I couldn't work out how to do those things and still look
good. Obvious boxes and lines looked a bit ugly.

> What I'm looking for is some basic hints on making panels look balanced
and proportionate.

This is only the 5th panel I've made so I'm not an expert! But something I
changed in how I laid it out was to switch from thinking about the x-y
point of the centre of each panel component to thinking about regions of
the panel, like in the picture attached, then centering the panel component
in the region.

It's probably not a huge insight, but it led me to do some things
differently to how I would before: the two columns are at width/4 and
3*width/4 instead of 1/3 , 2/3 which I've done before.

Also, previously I'd probably have aligned the 'scale' and 'CV' panel
components to the same y position, and same for "out" and 'mode' at the
bottom. But using regions the vertical spacing of the right column ends up
reduced compared to what I would have otherwise done.

I think it works...

[image: 20201006_124925.jpg]
[image: 20201014_094827.jpg]
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