I thought I'd post it here in case anyone wanted to discuss why you would
want to do that and how to go about it.
Its not just about making your patches look cool. There are some other
really good reasons to do it.
1: Primarily size constraints are going to drive you to do this. If your patch uses
lots of controls like granular 2, (65 knobs or so) space is going to become an issue.
You can save tons of space by drawing out the front panel yourself.
2: Fonts and Text Orientation: Currently you cannot choose your own fonts,
align them vertically or along a path within Mux.
This is also part of the size constraint thing, creative placement of text can
save you tons of screen space.
3: A good old fashioned desire for bling. IMO this can affect your creativity.
A neat looking interface can inspire you to work and place you in a mood
to guide your inspiration (at least a little). This also affects any users beside
you if you want to share it. A good front panel will be nearly the first thing that attracts
people to it. This is a basic marketing principle that works better than most
of us realize.
Ok, that's why. As for the how...
Well I'm not going to explain how to use photoshop unless someone has a specific
thing they want to know.
The thing to realize is that Mux gives us lots of room to change stuff via transparency
mostly. You can hide most things and replace them with your own. Its quite simple compared
to most others. Some plugins require hundreds of tiny images in addition to back
paintings to change the look of them. With Mux, its far easier and faster.
This example took about 3-4 hours work time, that's it. Much time was spent
just deciding what to do (about a day), but actual work time was very small.
Anyway, I'm not going to go on and on here. I just thought it would be good to
discuss. I'm sure many users might not be too familiar with how to achieve
a certain look or what tools might be useful. Ask here if you want, I and I'm sure
others will try to answer. Jo himself is quite the graphic designer IMO, unless he had
someone create all the graphics in Mux/MuLab for him.
I'm still trying "unsuccessfully" to come up with a better knob than the default.
Functionally and appearance wise it is tough to beat.
Also, should anyone have/create any nice Mux UI customizations they want to show.
Id be interested to see them and hear how you did it. I am finding UI design quite interesting,
so consider me interested.
Tools used: Photshop CC2015.5, JKnobman 1.3.2
-Cheers
