How large should a UI be at the most? Post your opinion.

[BlackWinny]

(where's the f***ing smiley for irony?)

Examples among others in my collection (and they remain respectful):








Yes you can...

[Ameyah Audio]

cool stuff!

i think a GUI should be working on 1366x768 good and also on the 4K displays aka 2160p.

[chk071]

i think a GUI should be working on 1366x768 good and also on the 4K displays aka 2160p.

+1

[KingTuck]

Depends on a lot of things. I think that Hive and DUNE 2 have very good GUI sizes. Obviously Hive is resizable but I just mean it's default size. Massive is a good size too. So is Serum.I'd say that stuff shouldn't get much larger than Massive though, until average monitor resolution increases of course.

[Mutant]

How large should a static (i.e. non-resizable) UI be at the most.

It should be resizable.
OK, but the real answer is, that it should depend on the most common screen resolution used by your customers.
You can cheat a bit and look at UI sizes of plugins from MAJOR developers (they already researched this topic) and average it out.

[Optical Fingerprint]

Vector all the way. Sharp, clean, resizable, plus the fact that this virtual 3d hardware look has become really tiresome, it is not hardware! you can't fool me!

[BlackWinny]

I'm currently working on a GUI which is 1200 pixels wide... and I'm really happy to be able to see clearly everything in the most comfortable UI which could be dreamed of.

[Chris-S]

How large should a static (i.e. non-resizable) UI be at the most.

Resolution doubles each few years, so a modern UI should be resizable.

[Apostate]

Sytrus should be about the size of Harmor. In fact, I don't think Harmor's gui size is a bad template, though I'm not sure about the look of that gui in itself.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

Vector all the way. Sharp, clean, resizable,

^^ this

Resolution doubles each few years, so a modern UI should be resizable.

and ^^ THIS

[SampleScience]

I'm at 1366x768 too, a lot of plugins don't fit on my screen, which is sad... For some of the best, I just use the controls that I can see when it's worth it, or try to use i on another computer that I have which as a bigger monitor (but is a Windows XP system).

[wagtunes]

I'm at 1366x768 too, a lot of plugins don't fit on my screen, which is sad... For some of the best, I just use the controls that I can see when it's worth it, or try to use i on another computer that I have which as a bigger monitor (but is a Windows XP system).

See this is what I don't understand. I'm on 1280 x 1024. Width wise your resolution is bigger than mind and yet the only plugin I have that doesn't fit on my screen width wise is ImpOSCar 2. Everything else fits just fine and length is never a problem, though I guess 768 could present one. Confusing to me how you can run that wide but can't run any longer than 768.

But regardless, with my resolution, which I'd qualify as smaller than yours, most old plugs made when common was 800x600 simply don't display large enough for me to read the fonts. I can't use them.

So how are you not having problems with those plugs?

[Keith99]

Problem with some resizeable UIs is that the text font does not resize e.g. FabFilter Pro Q2. On a 4K monitor it is great to be abel to resise proq but the text is still unreadable

[aciddose]

You can't effectively resize text at the resolutions we use. The DPI is too low.

Due to this the fonts are very carefully tweaked to ensure vertical and horizontal lines are aligned on pixels exactly. This is called "hinting". Modern anti-aliasing methods look very blurry without hinting, see "clear-type" on windows and compare hinted and unhinted fonts.

We currently use about 100dpi, you need at least 300dpi and more like 600dpi to allow for resizing the text at the resolution required to match an acceptable stepping of the scaling for the GUI.

For example the difference between 12pt and 13pt is probably 40 or more pixels on the GUI edge. Yet you want to adjust the width of the GUI by 1 pixel at a time. We can't go from 12pt to 12.001pt.

[firepile]

I'm at 1366x768 too, a lot of plugins don't fit on my screen, which is sad... For some of the best, I just use the controls that I can see when it's worth it, or try to use i on another computer that I have which as a bigger monitor (but is a Windows XP system).

See this is what I don't understand. I'm on 1280 x 1024. Width wise your resolution is bigger than mind and yet the only plugin I have that doesn't fit on my screen width wise is ImpOSCar 2. Everything else fits just fine and length is never a problem, though I guess 768 could present one. Confusing to me how you can run that wide but can't run any longer

This is a standard laptop screen resolution.