Hi Marcus, I checked out the two examples you mentioned. I never used that aspect of the GUI, I did it by ear. But since you brought them up, I see no other reason to introoduce color in these charts other than to help the user in two ways:
1) Resonator – helps the user to associate the setting made within the ‘grid’ to the key. The assistance is provuded by use oof a director line connecting the location to the corresponding key in athe horizontal domain. To me the use of color is redundant with the line, and couple easily be sub stituted with a hashed line with equal benefit.
2) EQ compressor – usues color to help discriminat lines that cross and diverge in a non-ambiguous way. Here, the line color provides a clear assistance that the usualing identical lines themselves cannoct. However, once again using a hashed line to differentiate between converging and diverging lines can provide the same discrimination between such lines as color provides. I can’t tell Gain 1 from Bass, but I can hear the different.
While some may not like hashed lines over colored line they provide the same functionallity to all users regardless of handicap. Also, there are certainly other solutions available to address this software issue; different palettes. With pallete colors; if used should afford the user complete use control, so I can select colors to prevent color aliasing.
The real nature of the two example you selected demonstates something very important in using color in the GUI: the color is only there to help define the information on thre graph better. A benefit here that had been discussed yet is that thee IDENTITY of the color is NOT IMPORTANT. This is crucial, if the user was required to not only discriminate the colors (not a biggie in my book) but to IDENTIFY them as Red, Green, Yellow, Oange, Purple, etc… it would be a complete failure. A little known fact about color blindness (Red/Green in particular), is that being able to name the color is often magnitudes more difficult than to merely differentiate them.
Here’s a little factoid, that maybe argued with, but certainly demonstrates the problem.
1) A person wiith R/F blindness see roughly 2/3 of the color you see.
2) Of the remaining colors 1/2 will alias with the previous 1/3 missing colors.
3) While, mathematically you might say at least we can see, and agree on 1/3 of the total number of colors. The sad fact is that those remaining colors literally don’t occur in isolation in nature – they will contain, to some degree some percentage of all those other colors we disagree with, can’t see, or perceive in some other fashion.
I have 12 MoogerFooger pedals, they use those tri/bi-color LED’s, and the all look the same color. While the pedals sounds great, it’s on of the worst UI designs with LED’s I’ve ever seen. This is sofware, there are so many ways to do it right for everyone.
Anyway, Marcus no hard feelings, and thanks for gving me a platform to express myself for Eventide.
