I know I’m beating a dead horse, but to me the ugliest part of the new GUI is the track headers. And there was something off about it that I couldn’t put my finger on, and today I finally realized what it was, and it speaks a lot about the sloppiness that went into designing some of the new GUI.
Because of the small size of this particular lack of detail, many people won’t even see it, and perhaps because I’m a visual creative these kind of details are more evident to me, but there are details that everybody can tell, even if they’re not experts in Photoshop, After Effects and so on.
I took a screenshot of the header and opened it in Affinity Photo (which is what I have in my personal Mac because I don’t like paying Adobe a lot of money every month), zoomed in the screenshot, and put a few guides, then did the math:
Of course this is not the most scientific test, but it’s more than evident that the M is not centered inside the button and is off by 2 pixels, which doesn’t seem like much, but somehow the human eye is really good at detecting those details, and I’m a guy in my fifties, my eyesight is far from perfect.
But that one is really evident once you saw it a few times, and it surprised me that to me letters are not centered vertically, but it seemed to me that it was more than just one pixel off. But that’s what it is.
And this tells you that whoever designed this GUI is not much into detail, because this is supposed to be designed in a large canvas and then resized to the size needed for the GUI. So how can you miss something as obvious as this? And I’m just talking about the M being off to the left, not even the vertical thing, which I probably wouldn’t have bothered me if the M was centered. It’s the same as the S, which there may be a tiny difference between the left and right sides, but to me it’s not obvious.
Call me a snob if you want, but the C12 GUI to me was polished in most places. What it needed was more polish, not redesign. Taking out the good old Cubase font, which as far as I can tell it’s an original, or not even a font, somebody designed a series of glyphs to use as part of the interface, and those were really good looking and gave the Cubase GUI a distinctive look.
Some people here said it’s a matter of functionality, that many programs go through a GUI overhaul and there’s always going to be haters and “refuseniks” (this one I had to look up because I had no clue what it was), and to a certain extent I agree, but I also think that when you spend all day long working with a specific software, you have to like the GUI.
I know that many people love Ableton Live, but when I look at that GUI it’s like looking at something from the 80’s, and not in a classic vintage sort of way, but an awful GUI with ugly text and no regards for style.
If anybody here has the Eastwest Opus Hollywood Orchestra, and also has or has seen the Best Service “Engine” GUIs, that’s a good showcase of the best and the absolute worst of GUIs. For those who don’t know them, here they are:
As you can see, the Opus Hollywood Orchestra GUI is a work of art. Beautiful, well thought out design, with a GUI that can be scaled up or down depending on your needs.
Now, let’s take a look at the worst GUI I’ve seen in my life, a total trainwreck that would have been horrendous even in 1991, the Best Service Engine. Yes, the company has a name that makes you think they offer cleaning services or something like that. And they are so devoid of creativity that they named their engine “Engine”. Like making a horror movie and naming it “Horror Movie”.
So here’s the monstrosity:
Among other things, libraries have to be installed completely manually, like those few Kontakt libraries that install the files and you have to browse to them inside Kontakt.
But that’s small potatoes. The thing is so old and outdated that doesn’t even have a VST 3 plugin. If you have an Apple Silicon machine, you have to run Cubase in Rosetta mode to be able to load it.
Equally terrible is the fact that that horrible GUI with text you can barely read is not scalable, so you will end up with a headache after using it for a while.
Lucky for me, they gave me back my money for the library I had bought, because it was a decent library but the engine it ran on is garbage.
Of course I’m not saying that the new Cubase 13 GUI is a trainwreck, far from it, but after getting used to work with a really original and unique GUI for several months, this one seems like a huge step back.
) and all-purpose saboteurs of Steinberg.
