Audacity Clean and Modern theme

Hi all!

I just created a custom theme for Audacity, which I call “Clean and Modern”.
While creating it, I had two goals:

  1. Make Audacity interface look clean, without so many UI elements crashing and calling for attention. I did this by reducing the contrast of toolbar and button backgrounds, so that the 3D effect is almost non existent.

  2. Use a modern and good looking iconset. IMO, the ‘Classic’ icons are too 1995 and the Material icons currently used in default theme really didn’t went well with the rest of Audacity interface (although looking great on mobile). So I used the Fugue icon set ( http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/ ), which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Most icons were used unmodified, some were remixed from Fugue and some were created from scratch by me.

This is still a Work in Progress, but I think it’s pretty usable already. I hope you enjoy it!

clean-modern.png
Audacity-Clean-and-Modern.zip (237 KB)

“Clean and Modern” is very close to “light” theme, (which I hate with a vengeance)
''Clean and Modern'' Vs Light.gif

I like the coloured icons and flatter (small) buttons (such as the tools toolbar).
Personally I like light themes, though not everyone does.

It is, indeed. As I said, I basically changed the background of toolbars and buttons and the icon set.

By the way, I forgot to mention in the first post: I only tested the theme in Windows 10. I had no idea how it would look like in a Win 9x classic theme. Now I know. Thanks :wink:

WxWidgets (the GUI toolkit that Audacity uses), makes use of native OS specific components, so some parts of the GUI come directly from the underlying OS theme rather than from Audacity’s theme engine. This has the advantage that it helps give Audacity a “native” look for the operating system that it is running on, but the downside is that custom themes tend to look much better on some computers than others.

Consequently, it is a good idea when presenting a new theme, to say what system it was designed for. In this case, as Windows 10 has very few theme options, I guess that your new theme will suit any Windows 10 machine. Similarly on Mac. On Linux there are a lot of theme options, so for the best appearance it is necessary to have an Audacity theme that works well with the Desktop theme.

Hi there, thank you for your theme. Looks really nice indeed.
I agree that it looks a lil bit more Windows desgined than other OSes… but nice work!

Thank you.
Victor