Colour and Design Decisions

From a design perspective, I sort of knew what route I was going to go down with this application. I wanted to draw attention to interface components using colour and push back the rest of the interface using grey tones. Adobe’s new CS6 suite and Ableton Live are classic examples of this.

Orange was used as a spot colour on interface components like menu selections / buttons etc – for no other reason than that it was the orange used on the audio components and felt quite modern / technological.

I also wanted each audio component to be a different colour – hoping that it would aid in learnability and identification – and also create a nice “rainbow” look and feel. Creating the colour swatches that “go across the spectrum” was actually quite difficult – in the end I created colour palettes using Adobe’s Kuler online application. The current state looks quite nice with the interface pushed back to blue/grey tones with spots of colour for the draggable objects.

The logo came about fairly easily once the interface started taking shape – I used the circles from the interface next to the text and this seemed to work well. As per Apple’s guidelines I stuck with Helvetica Neue for the interface text.