FabFilter User Forum
Suggestion: Skin match option across FabFilter Plugin Library
You guys are obviously visually oriented and can probably understand how the UI design and colors you are staring at can effect the zone you are in while making sound. I'd like to be able to select a single color scheme for all my FabFilter Plugins.
Though I wouldn't generally say I am pulled toward yellow and green, I dig the overall visual gestalt of FabFilter Pro-DS the best. I think it's the background color that really does it for me. The colored bits contrast really well against it.
Greg Houston — Sep 15, 2013
Hi Greg,
We carefully choose colors and visual styles for all our plug-ins so we definitely don't want them all to look the same (otherwise we'd have done so already).
Skinning sounds like a cool feature but creating a new "skin" takes a huge amount of work if you want to do it right, and otherwise it's just ugly. We feel that our time is better spent creating one very polished and recognizable GUI for each plugin. Hope you understand!
Cheers,
Right on. My day job is UI design. I'm a "musician" (using that term loosely) by night.
I'm figuring a lot of your UI is drawn directly, like your splines and graphs, but even just making the original images files for the controls and backgrounds available in their own folder for editing (like with the 2CAudio reverbs) rather than compiling them would be great. Visual tweekers like myself could just replace them. No actual theming functions in the plugins required.
Unlike with the 2CAudio PNGs, the theming process could be simplified a great deal with sprites. Particularly if UI elements that are shared across different plugins were grouped on the same sprite.
If you are using vectors, which would not only make future possibilities for scaling possible, but make editing a hundred times easier, you could use SVG or EPS files instead of PNGs.
I realize you already said, no, but if there is any somewhat easy way to make the graphics accessible (regardless of file format or organization), that would be enough, and super appreciated. And of course it's not the end of the world if they can't be themed at all.
I tend to be in and out of the Pro plugins fairly quickly. It is the creative plugins that I might be staring at for hours on end and they happen to be the more vibrant set. Though their themes are fun, they can be a little overwhelming after a half hour or so. Your basic dark gray background with blue accents is a lot easier to completely forget so that the UI becomes transparent while you are staring at it for extended periods.
Cheers,
G.