READ ME

Welcome to the Audacity Artwork and Graphics forum.

This forum board is primarily for fun, and for Audacity enthusiasts to share their graphical ideas about Audacity.

Over the years, many Audacity users have created new logos, themes, icons and other graphical works relating to Audacity. Rarely are we able to use these graphics, but we very much enjoy seeing them. Theme support is currently quite limited in Audacity, but that is not to say that it will not be improved.

About the Audacity logo:
The name “Audacity” and the Audacity logo are registered trademarks with strong brand recognition. There are no plans to change the name, and no intention to make radical changes to the logo. Brand recognition is developed over years of exposure, so making a major change to the logo will not be undertaken lightly. Nevertheless, Audacity users have submitted some beautiful and highly innovative logos, some of which will be showcased in this forum.

About Theme Support:
Several years ago, Audacity had experimental theme support that allowed a certain amount of customization of the Audacity interface. Only a couple of old beta versions had this feature enabled, but in that short time it proved to be very popular, despite the bugs and limitations of the experimental version. Theme support has returned, though currently with limitations.

See here in the manual for information about the included themes: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/themes.html

For information about creating custom themes, see here in the Audacity wiki: https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Theming_HowTo

Additional information about the old experimental theme support (not officially supported), see this post: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?p=264460#p264460.

Buttons and Icons:
We hope that the buttons and icons that are used in the Audacity interface are clear with regard to their meaning, but the Audacity developers are primarily software developers rather than graphic designers. The Audacity graphical interface does not support “skins”, so there is no simple way to modify the icons. The icons and button graphics are embedded within the Audacity code. There are also technical considerations concerning cross-platform support. The clarity of meaning of buttons and icons is recognised to be very important, but so too is having an overall design that is visually appealing and coherent.

Technical Considerations:
Audacity is a cross-platform multi-track audio editor, built on the wxWidgets framework. Much of the appearance of the GUI is determined by wxWidgets. To be able to do serious work on the appearance of the Audacity GUI requires knowledge of wxWidgets, what it allows and what its limitations are. Contributions from graphic artists that have programming experience are very welcome, but you don’t need to have a computer programming background to share your ideas here.

Disclaimer:
Artwork and graphics posted here may never be used in Audacity. Nevertheless, contributions made here may influence the appearance of future versions of Audacity. Audacity is a free, open source program that is primarily developed and supported by volunteers in their spare time. By posting original art work here it is assumed that you are happy for such works to be used by Audacity, within the terms of the Audacity GPL v2 license.

Contribution Requests:
From time to time the development of Audacity requires new graphical elements to be added. These may be as little as adding one new button, or could be much bigger tasks. When there are such requirements a description of the task may be posted in this forum by one of the forum crew. These requests are an open invitation for the artistically inclined members of the Audacity community to contribute their designs. Please note, there is no guarantee that submissions made here will be used, but it is through the countless contributions from Audacity enthusiasts that Audacity has become the leading open source audio editor that it is today.

Image file formats:
Images attached to forums posts should be in PNG, GIF or JPG (JPEG) format and limited to a maximum size of 650 x 500 pixels (w x h)