I remember when Ableton came out with their first version of Live. Their GUI was in stark contrast with the rest of the industry at the time. Simple colors and flat looking objects compared to mostly skeuomorphic design. I liked their design choices back then and still do. Simple, easy to read and quick to find what you’re looking for on the screen. The graphical design of Live hasn’t changed much in 24 years and I think for a good reason—they got it right from the start.
Nowadays flat designed GUIs are in fashion but I feel a lot of them are missing the mark.
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Flat designs were modern 10 years ago. Especially flat design 1.0 which Cubase is trying to follow.
I don’t understand why Cubase must follow trends no matter what. In the next 10 years people will look at flat interfaces like we look now at Winamp skins or MySpace pages. At that time Cubase will finally catch up to be perfectly flat: just white text on a black background and everything will bes separated by straight white lines. Then people will beg Steinberg to make it look ultra colourful 5D because that will be the next trend 
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Ableton Live GUI is also much less “busy” which is why I think the flat look is more acceptable for it in my opinion. For example it only has 1 tool in the toolbar being the pencil tool. The majority of Abletons functionality are smartly placed in right click context menus , hotkeys and such. I feel like Cubase generally doesn’t have a good foundation to start with to implement a flat GUI.
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So do you think this example is an improvement ?
I personally dislike the sharp edges and the flat colour.
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Another day, another GUI concept. This concept I consider as non-essential but it would be nice to have.
Toolbars Icons and Inspector View sections should be freely re-arrangeable so that users can re-arrange and position toolbar icons and inspector view sections however they desire.
This concept would allow the user to re-arrange elements in a way that makes the most sense to them and their workflow.
Interested to hear your opinions.
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Recently they asked for feedback and I told them we don’t need more features, we need customization tools and readability on the UI .
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Really?
As someone not in the know, I’m truly asking if that is just exaggeration (which is fine as far as I’m concerned), or actually true.
Thanks!
I agree that Ableton’s GUI is pretty good and simple.
I’m gonna circle back to this design. I think this sort of a flat design implementation but done extremely well.
The design is clear, the text is readable. Existing Cubase users as well as new users should be able to use this easily. As someone mentioned, using vector graphics instead of raster graphics would make the readability and clarity consistent across various resolutions and systems. (Ableton introduced Vector graphics from Live 10)
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This has been discusssed several times over already. As far as I can tell there are technical reasons for the current implementation. The previous design produced a single task floating bar, that alienated a lot of customers with its behaviour. Looks were ok but behaviour was “wrong”.
With the current design some people post images of other apps like Visual Studio that have the menu integrated in the title bar. But so far I have only seen examples of apps that use a single window approach, while Cubase allows to open multiple windows, each having their menues. I haven’t seen an example of a multi-window app on Windows with an integrated menu bar. I assume, coming to the beginning of this paragraph, there is a technical reason for that.
MacOS uses a different window/menu design where none of this matters.
I was lookig and comparing these, shall we call them frames for several weeks, coming directly from C12 to C14. I can’t say that I prefer one over the other. However, a clear regression IMO is the drawing of the frame around colored buttons like the transport bar.
Where in C12 the frame is always drawn with the same color…
in C14 they use a modulated color from the button itself for the frame color:
I think that makes it just look wrong.
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Not an exaggeration, unfortunately.
You’ll come across the same discussion on multiple forums often on the company’s website! Imagine ignoring the input of people who are invested and engaged in your application. Truly bizarre.
I think the people eventually give up and drift off to other applications. The software companies will blame the economy or some other “its not our fault” excuse.
It’s especially odd to someone who works in marketing.
In marketing, it doesn’t matter what I think - the market either responds to the message or it doesn’t.
If the market doesn’t like what you say, then you don’t make sales and you get fired.
I don’t see the present developer attitude changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
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Nice observation JM…! I know nothing about these things, but, humour me…
It seems like the solid ‘frame’ around the buttons is an overlayed ‘final ornament’ for this transport control-cluster in C12; whilst in C14, maybe the (slightly oversize) ‘buttons’ were laid down after the frame ornament had been placed.? Their edges now laying ‘on top’ of the frame. Individual button colours are not ‘solid’ and have some bleed when placed over the lighter background of the frame.
Though, perhaps doesn’t quite account for the ‘rounded’ corners at each end (cycle and record buttons) mind… you’d think the outer frame border was there to provide that aesthetic alone…
Anyway, whatever… I agree, the comparison shows this is 100% wrong in C14.
Usually this is simply painted by the GUI designer that way. What you see are bitmaps or some vector graphic format. I don’t know what the kids use these days, .png and .svg? There is usually no fancy programmed transparency or similiar stuff happening inside the program.
I do appreciate that the cycle button now has almost Commodore 64 colours.
Like most users I usually do not chime in on complaints, but this is ridiculous. Are we now pandering to teenagers in design? Cubase was such a professional looking interface, easy to read with clear cut lines. Now it is super dark, no contrast, flat, cheesy looking interface. I now feel like I’m using Studio One or some other cheeseball software. It looks so cheep and unprofessional.
Someone needs to put a grownup back in charge of design.
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Yes. 100% agree. Horrible design decisions. This is 50 steps backwards from Cubase 12. Very unprofessional looking. Hard to use. Makes Cubase look like low budget, cheesy software. This needs fixed ASAP.
VERY disappointed.
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Not only I agree. This is the main reason I stopped using Cubase and moved to Ableton. What a difference in look! Granted, Live has fewer features and may seem like the opposite of what Cubase is all about. But I care about my eyes, and according to them, Cubase on Mac is completely unusable. At least on Windows you can scale the UI.
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Still using Cubase 12.
13’s GUI just looks bad, tried to use it for a few weeks, but no, doesn’t have the flexability of 12, or the other previous versions.
Haven’t bothered to update to 14.
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Gorgeous!!!
Please hire this guy!
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Is this just “photoshopping” GUI pictures… or are this GUI changes part of a working C14?
My guess is the first???
Is it as easy to implement in a working C14, as it is making a “pretty” picture?
My guess is that it’s not???
Just wondering…
Graphically I agree that Cubase is a bit of a mystery to me. That’s all I’m saying! This thread has STAMINA!
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The inspector doesn’t bug me too much I just don’t understand why “Quick Controls” was shortened to “QC” when there’s plenty of space for the whole name and “QC” is an industry-standard term for “Quality Control” so it just causes unnecessary confusion.
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