1.5 KiB
1.5 KiB
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 withSimp.immediate_*and custom shaders for the album-skin aesthetic. gfx/shaders.jaiis where custom GLSL lives.- The visualizer is a fullscreen quad behind the UI sampling FFT bins from
audio/analysis.jai.