33 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
# Aesthetic direction
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Target: a ridiculous audio player from the early 2000s — the kind that shipped on a CD-ROM with an album. Think:
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- The Linkin Park *Meteora* player
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- Björk's *Biophilia* app (later, but same energy)
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- Custom Winamp skins from skins.com circa 2002
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- Limited-edition iPod-companion players
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## Visual cues
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- **Chunky** UI elements. Big buttons, big knobs, big sliders. No sleek minimalism.
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- **Neon + metallic gradients**. Electric blue, hot pink, lime, chrome silver. Glossy highlights on buttons.
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- **Drop shadows, glows, bevels**. Embrace the skeuomorphism.
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- **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.
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- **Album art is huge**. Artist photo as a backdrop with a darkened gradient over it.
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- **Spectrum visualizer** behind the now-playing screen, reacting to the audio FFT.
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- **Custom shader effects** — bloom, scanlines, chromatic aberration, plasma, whatever fits.
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- **Cheesy fonts**. Bold italic, maybe a script font for the artist name.
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## What to avoid
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- Spotify/Apple Music minimalism
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- Material Design / Fluent UI
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- Flat design
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- Anything that looks like it was designed in 2018+
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## Practical notes for the codebase
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- 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.
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- `gfx/shaders.jai` is where custom GLSL lives.
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- The visualizer is a fullscreen quad behind the UI sampling FFT bins from `audio/analysis.jai`.
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