# Aesthetic direction

Target: a ridiculous audio player from the early 2000s — the kind that shipped on a CD-ROM with an album. Think:

- The Linkin Park *Meteora* player
- Björk's *Biophilia* app (later, but same energy)
- Custom Winamp skins from skins.com circa 2002
- Limited-edition iPod-companion players

## Visual cues

- **Chunky** UI elements. Big buttons, big knobs, big sliders. No sleek minimalism.
- **Neon + metallic gradients**. Electric blue, hot pink, lime, chrome silver. Glossy highlights on buttons.
- **Drop shadows, glows, bevels**. Embrace the skeuomorphism.
- **Non-grid layouts**. The play controls don't have to live in a tidy bottom bar — they can be a curved cluster off to the side.
- **Album art is huge**. Artist photo as a backdrop with a darkened gradient over it.
- **Spectrum visualizer** behind the now-playing screen, reacting to the audio FFT.
- **Custom shader effects** — bloom, scanlines, chromatic aberration, plasma, whatever fits.
- **Cheesy fonts**. Bold italic, maybe a script font for the artist name.

## What to avoid

- Spotify/Apple Music minimalism
- Material Design / Fluent UI
- Flat design
- Anything that looks like it was designed in 2018+

## Practical notes for the codebase

- We get rect-based widgets from `GetRect_LeftHanded`, but we should freely draw on top of them with `Simp.immediate_*` and custom shaders for the album-skin aesthetic.
- `gfx/shaders.jai` is where custom GLSL lives.
- The visualizer is a fullscreen quad behind the UI sampling FFT bins from `audio/analysis.jai`.
