The one thing I’d say about the leaked photos is I don’t really like the slim trig keys, having only used the square ones on the MK2 analogs and the DT. I wonder why they wanted to squeeze the size down from the OT sized box. Having that with the square trig keys and a bit more space for a few other buttons would be a bit nicer imo. I wonder if the reduced width on the leaked photos really adds a lot given it’s not down to the compactness of the Digi format anyway.
With anything like this I’ll reserve judgement until we get a proper announcement with the finish product and actually understand what is inside this thing to see if the UI stacks up or not.
I’m generally a big fan of the Electron aesthetics though, particularly the recent black units. For me personally I’d happily forgo the pads/keyboards in favour of some more performance controls but I understand that might just be me!
I think it’s important to stick to an average Elektron design not too far from the other boxes. Many Elektron users own more than 1 box and would be pretty disturbed with a totally different layout across the range when using it live especially.
Guys, I know, designers tend to obsess with grids. I am a designer myself and I sometimes overdo it myself. But it’s important to understand that it’s not a matter of graphics design. It’s product design. There’s more variables at play.
First and foremost, there’s a PCB underneath. And if you aren’t manufacturing iphones or macbooks, where they have incomparable resources to play a very expensive puzzle game with custom internal component arrangements, sometimes your internals doesn’t align properly with what’s outside the case. Usually, standard electronic components are being used, which have their own standard dimensions and limitations. Therefore, you have to look for clever compromises.
Secondly, there’s ergonomics. Scrupulous alignment is often a killer of good ergonomics. And I think in this regard, the design is pretty good, it has good placement of these functional areas, as someone posted. I think there’s a very prominent horizontal axis in the middle, which separates playing & controlling from parameter changing. Then there’s a vertical axis, which allows two handed use without obstructing the display. I think it makes perfect sense, to be able to us the musical keys with left hand, while also navigating the system directionally with the right hand (that’s pretty much the same across all Elektron devices).
Yeah, I started doing it that way at first too, but things went wrong in places and didn’t match the leaked pictures, decided to just follow the grid as much as possible
I couldn’t dismiss anyone’s design efforts because I have no experience whatsoever in this sort of thing. A few points I’d bring up though are…
I’ve owned quite a few Elektron boxes and not only do I find them fairly intuitive to learn, there’s this quality about them where if you know any one of them pretty well, you have a huge jump start to learn one of their other instruments. This makes me tend to trust their judgement when it comes to design.
Another thing is…do we even know for certain that’s what the final design is? If it’s the one in these pictures, I quite like it, so no problems here.
Lastly, we can only speculate on what this machine actually does (assuming it’s real) at this point, unless I missed something. I’m assuming once we know what it actually does, the design could make a lot more sense
The release of this one could be far off, and who knows what stage this specific prototype was at. We could see either minor of major changes in the final design, but my guess is that at least the new box size we can be fairly certain about.
Ah ok. I think it might be interesting to try a version that assumes that it’s the same depth as the Digi format boxes (176mm) and uses the same knob, button, and screen sizes to see if you can more closely match it up to DN’s arrangement.
I suspect it’ll be fairly close to DN’s layout because it would look good next to a Digi box in a setup shot, I think they would aim for that.
My guess is that the bank of 8 knobs will be in the same relative position at least.
Gotta mute this thread, I cant take anymore posts of scribbles of a device thats still to be announced.
Elektron have their vision it doesn’t matter how many pictures you create, you ain’t getting their job, Polyend might be interested though one of those designs looks similar to the Polyend Play
I see what you mean. Would love to be a fly on the wall where some of these design decisions are agreed. One would imagine they thought pretty hard on what would be the right sized box for something like this.
one of those designs looks similar to the Polyend Play