Zynthlight: a CMI-inspired 1980's monochrome colour scheme for the Zynthian UI

Using Zynthian
1

Hi @jofemodo, @riban, @zynthianers,

As promised, I am sharing here the Zynthlight custom monochrome colour scheme for the Zynthian UI, with an underlying design concept inspired by the CRT green-phosphor monitors of the 1980’s, and the user interface of the CMI Fairlight.

I made a bit of research to identify the average RGB frequencies of CRT screens’ green characters and background colours, which, for entailed technological reasons, weren’t capable of displaying a #000000 pitch-black. If you want, you can adjust this value (Panel background color) to your liking, and to the kind of display your Zynthian is working with (any black RGB code between #000000 and #222222 will do), but I found my choice to be historically plausible, and visually effective in terms of contrast.

Some colour settings are apparently hardwired into Zynthian OS, and not reachable through webconf, thus I couldn’t configure them, namely: Solo highlight of chains in Mixer View (yellow), level fader of currently selected chain in Mixer View (medium grey) and pan position of chains in Mixer View (light green). Fortunately, the latter two colours matched perfectly my desired colour scheme!

Furthermore, the Zynseq + Arranger views and the Pattern editor also use a pre-set non-configurable colour palette, therefore they cannot match the overall green-monochrome design of the Zynthlight UI scheme, and don’t really seem to work well with the ascetic style of this interface, because they need a sequence of hues for their UX. In order to achieve this, I suggest that a series of textured hatchings a-la-1980’s software graphics - with alternate pixel squares and horizontal / vertical / diagonal linear patterns - could obtain a gamut of visually recognisable variants of monochrome green, with an arguably convincing vintage look, but this would have to be implemented and verified.

Besides, I have chosen the Orbitron available font in UI options, but would like to include in this UI style a specific TTF text font that I have found, with a lovely early-digital nostalgia flair. There are several more TTF fonts, than the five selectable in webconf, stored in /zynthian/zynthian-ui/fonts, but, beyond having pasted my new TTF there, I don’t know how to install it in the webconf data libraries.

These are the procedure and colour values for installing the Zynthlight UI scheme in your Zynthian:

1] Go to Webconf > Interface > UI options, and check Advanced View.

2] Scroll down to Font & Colors.

3] Copy/Paste the following values in their corresponding fields:

  • Font size: 15-17
    (depending on your official kit’s generation or custom build’s screen size. The attached images with a 17 font size come from my Custom Pi5 with a 16" display).

  • Font Family: Orbitron

  • Info color: #33FF33

  • Error color: #6EFF6E

  • MIDI color: #33FF33

  • Alternate color: #33FF33

  • 2nd alternate color: #33FF33

  • Background color: #51595A

  • Text color: #33FF33

  • Text-Off color: #33FF33

  • On color: #51595A

  • Low-On color: #33FF33

  • Off color: #51595A

  • Highlight color: #8A999A

  • Midlight color: #737F80

  • Panel background color: #222222

  • Panel highlight color: #737F80

[BTW, I have decoded and written a Zynthian UI colours dictionary, for general usage, which I will publish in another thread, and which I think might be worthy of being available in the Zynthian Wiki].

Enjoy!

All the best :sparkle:

Aethermind_Zynthlight Colour Scheme_Mixer View
Aethermind_Zynthlight Colour Scheme_Mixer View1920×1080 73.5 KB

Aethermind_Zynthlight Colour Scheme_Main view
Aethermind_Zynthlight Colour Scheme_Main view1920×1080 107 KB

Aethermind_Zynthlight Colour Scheme_Preset Edit-Amp ADSR
Aethermind_Zynthlight Colour Scheme_Preset Edit-Amp ADSR1920×1080 74.5 KB

13 Likes
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I get to like it first!

Excellent work!
Take less soup!

1 Like
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Good: reduced rook portion today for me then! :wink:

4

It will, however, be a far less appealing shade of green . . .

1 Like
5

What about the persistence of characters: we need a screen saver :laughing:

2 Likes
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Hi! If you mean that the Oram splash page, and a screen server when Zynthian is in idle state, should also align with the overall monochrome-green retro vibe, I couldn’t agree more, and would gladly provide the required graphical resources (maybe, with a Fairlight-ish logo as well), but this is something that should be enabled by and agreed with our project chief! :wink:

Regards :rainbow:

7

Ohhhh! This is really nice! Thanks a lot, @Aethermind !! You honored your words, mate!!
Just 2 ounces of rook soup for you this night … :grin:

I’m pretty sure we should have a “color profile” option to allow easy config of this. I hope nobody is against this.

All the best!

3 Likes
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That’s not even enough to put the feathers in . . .

1 Like
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That is exactly the idea I wanted to suggest, and it would definitely be lovely to have UI colour profile presets to select from in webconf. I could also add my personal blue-centered scheme.

All the best mate! :grinning:

10

:rofl: :rofl:

11

I like. :hearts:
The only remark: Those green monitors were not able to show grey. They only showed shades of green on graphite/dark grey under ambient light, or black without ambient light. I had to work with these things decades ago.

1 Like
12

Hi @fussl :slight_smile:

I am well aware of that, and have long pondered the possibility of eschewing shades of grey, resorting instead to hues of green and negative characters, but there are restraints in place in the way the UI colours and fonts dictionary has been organised by the Zynthian devs, and such a solution wasn’t possible to implement, due to the way the various UI interface items interact differently in different OS views. Thus, introducing “modern” shades of grey seemed the only logical alternative, as a viable compromise.

Regards!

13

I had an orange monitor for many years. I modified its lne rate (which rather pushed its internal electronics to the edge of operation with associated loud line whistle) to run at the strange 35.809 kHz line rate for hi-res). I felt both special (to have a different, orange display) and odd (to differ from the normal black & white) but it certainly felt a little idosyncratic, having used the green screens up until this point. It was a bit like having a colour display… he he :wink: .

I may be one of the biggest cuplprits for deviating from the colour scheme in zynthian. There is a fairly small pallete of defined colours and they don’t necessarily have intuitive or generic / extenisble names. Sometimes I have used a colour name that sounds or looks right (although it may subsequently be proven to be inappropriate) and other times I may have hard coded a colour to get something working and failed to revisit and use a named colour.

Expanding the named pallet of colours is a good aspiration and if we take this opportunity to update and docuement the naming convnention then we may ease future development. This sounds like a task that one of our entripid community members would be able (and willing?) to persue. Any offers???

1 Like
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Hi @riban! I have already prepared a webconf Zynthian colours configuration dictionary (which will publish today, as soon as I have some spare time), and can gladly contribute to devising an extension to the current pre-set palette, with the appropriate reference info. :slight_smile:

1 Like