Which Elektron instrument has the best looks? Which has the most beautiful box / manual art? Which wins in terms of most attractive UI?
Analog Rytm MKII grey wins for me both in terms of the instrument and the box art. The instrument has that beautiful industrial design charme, the size and slight angle is useful and attractive. Even the back with its individual outs somehow looks cool. Don’t know what it is about AR that makes it look cooler than A4, maybe because of its unique pads.
I love the A4 MKII/DN/DT boxes with their one color design (missed opportunity with OT MK II here, should have ditches the “box follows fct button color scheme” here). But the slightly bigger boxes of AR and A4 look best imo, with AR blue winning slightly over A4 for me. Both of them together are even better, same goes for putting both instruments in grey next to each other to form a unit. I prefer grey for both of these. OT MK II somehow looks better in black though.
For UI, I would have to vote for Syntakt going the extra mile and coming up with creative, iconic symbols that also represent what is happening in an intuitive way. DT and DN didn’t go that far, although I love parameters like width and feedback on DN. OT’s bare pixel rawness is also nice, but not that intuitive to read and a bit more barebones.
Don’t know what box art for the oldest machines looked like and would be curious.