I think Steinberg’s best option is to give us A LOT more options in GUI configuration. Then we can configure to our individual tastes.
Font size is my big thing. Because if I could increase that it would also remedy my other major issue with the tiny size of all the parameters on the Inspector. All those buttons and paramters need to scale up in size when the (hopefully future) font controls allow us to scale up at our desire.
And I’m not happy they changed the black symbols on the track controls into white. Then took the white symbols on the Transport and turned them black. Ugh. I found those to be perfect the way they were in C12. Especially the Track Controls.
I think they’ll iron some of this out probably in a month or two. I’m not saying this to you but to the group, in general. Because I see some who are very impatient to get Steinberg acknowledgement which isn’t likely to happen. And we’re nearing a holiday season, so I’m not expecting much until sometime early next year realistically. I also still expect this will take 2 or 3 patches to iron out. We’ll see.
I have the opinion that the developers of the interface simply did not finish it and released it to the world. Switched to a light theme and saw black holes instead of slots effect.
This is the detail that bothered me the most, and that’s why I’m now rolling with a blueish theme. It reminded me of this, straight away.
If this was looked into, we would get soooo much more flexibility when it comes to choosing our custom scheme. Right now, well, you see that it doesn’t look very good with grey, for example.
While removing button color gradient and changing the button shapes may be a subjective matter of style and taste, it’s pretty clear the “all white” buttons letter and icons are a failure in function. I hope Steinberg addresses this immediately.
My feature suggestion to SB: Allow the user to chose between “modern” or “classic” themes. Save face AND keep the user base happy.
It seems that audio people are 10 years behind and they’re chasing ‘trends’ of Windows 10 GUI, while even Win11 (fortunately) went away from that flat ugly look.
Who knows, maybe Cubase 14 will be made of tiles like Win8
It’s ironic that someone on here recently told me, and then doubled down on it, that Steinberg took to a flat look in C13 due to it being the most modern look, based on OS.
Yet as you mention Windows 11 went away from that flat look and now features rounded edges and soft gradients. oops!
I’m not a GUI designer, so I did a quick search for the ‘modern flat’ designs.
It looks like ultra flat designs were really trendy in 2013, so my shot ‘10 years ago’ was actually accurate hahaha Since then, there’s something like ‘flat 2.0’ - an improved version of it that is not ‘ultra flat’ anymore.
So, after all those years of listening to complaints that Cubase looks like from the '90s, they finally managed to update it to the year 2013
Ps. please don’t take my comments seriously. At this point, I can only laugh about the state of C13 GUI
the latency window strip is the worst part. Once we activate show latency, the full strip looks like an emergency after thought, not fitted into place correctly.
Windows XP had the rounded corners. The start of it on the Windows side I think. Then Windows 7 later. So maybe this could be considered revision 3 in that design style?
Either way blocky graphics with tiny fonts/elements squeezed together aren’t part of the modern OS design if you’re using ‘modern’ Windows today. There needs to be a balance between positive and negative space, and not just jamming as many controls as you can onto the screen.
In GUI design, I think an important part of function is in the form.
The latest Win11 23H2 has updated file explorer. The top of it is updated and now it doesn’t match the bottom. The top is lighter, a tiny bit transparent and round and the bottom is unchanged flat and dark.
I like those changes. Win10 feels to me like Win95 just with inverted colours.
Ps. The info about ‘flat 2.0’ was related to all GUI designs, not just the OS.
Agreed. For a lot of us this isn’t our first rodeo and things like this are beyond frustrating. It’s easy to write people off and tell them to read the manual when they themselves are not truly understanding the issue / bigger picture. This isn’t an issue of not knowing how things work, it’s being annoyed with the changes being implemented and how it affects people visually.
Blockquote
Since flat design’s emergence in 2011, Nielsen Norman Group has been a vocal critic of its inherent usability issues. Our primary objection to flat design is that it tends to sacrifice users’ needs for the sake of trendy aesthetics.
For years, users had been exposed to traditional signifiers of clickability, such as blue, underlined links and 3D effects on buttons. As design trends shift and users are exposed to new patterns, the average user’s ability to intuitively identify linked elements has evolved. But just because users are better at detecting linked elements doesn’t mean they don’t need any clues at all. In fact, we’ve noticed that long-term exposure to these flat yet clickable elements has been slowly reducing user efficiency by complicating their understanding of what’s clickable and what isn’t.
