I was asked by a manufacturer about there karaoke discs and i said i thought there title screen was a bit dated which of these brands do you prefer (ignore what the song is ) its the style of the screen the font and the images that i am interested in , i would really like non karaoke enthusiasts to comment on the design element of the title screen




so out of these do you prefer the look of

The music factory

Zoom

Sunfly

Soundchoice






and out of these

Music factory

Mr Entertainer

Sing to the world

SBI


your opinions will be very useful and gratefully recieved

thanks

Personally, I like the Zoom one, it's clean and precise, no extra junk to fight through. Out of the second batch, I didn't like any of them.

thanks that seems to be the general opinion from others i have asked ..thanks for the input

Of the first group...

The music factory - reminds me of a load screen from an ancient DOS PC game. Very dated choice of colors and, er, "fonts".

Zoom - nice and easy to read. I still think it could use a redesign to make it more modern, but it's the best of the four.

Sunfly - horrible colors, grade school artwork, and I don't see what they'd do if there was a long song title.

Soundchoice - roman font doesn't seem like the best choice, but I'd probably consider this 2nd best.

Of the second group...

Music factory - same as first comment. And I should comment that red on blue is not a good contrast choice.

Mr Entertainer - what's more important here, their graphic or the information that it's supposed to be conveying?

Sing to the world - very plain, but at least it's clear and easy to read.

SBI - what's with the 1990's clipart collection at the bottom?

lol spot on what i was thinking

These are the title screens for CDG discs they are limited to 16 colors 4 bit 300 x 216 pixels many manufacturers blame this for poor design .

sunfly is actually the biggest manufacturer in the UK and i agree about the grade school artwork


I think music factory is the most dated they are the ones i commented on to the manufacturer. They do seem eager for input and to take on ideas so hopefully with a few inexpensive and simple tweaks they will improve there products

Sounds similar to an EGA setup.

At any rate, BECAUSE your capabilities are limited, you should keep it simple and professional looking. Putting in horrible graphics just because the system is "kind of" capable of it, isn't a particularly good reason to do so.

Zoom is a fairly good example of KISS, but I still think that even with those limitations they could all look more modern. Assuming the fonts are not required to be built-in to these devices for those screens, font choice is key, followed by a simple graphic design that doesn't TRY to be bright, vibrant or snazzy. Hide the system's limitations, don't advertise them.

Incidentally, why are these machines still stuck in the 1990's...

CDG was a format that came by by accident allowing graphics on the spare space on a CD and strangley enough this became the defacto standard for karaoke discs

of course it wasnt long before pirates found a way to copy them then later still to make them in a computer format ..CDG bin files are turned into two files one is a graphics file and one the audio the most common computer karaoke file type is MP3+G mp3 being the music +G being the limited graphics. with such small file sizes you can store 1000's of tracks on a hard drive .

of course now people like nice graphics and better sound but karaoke manufacturers have tried and still make DVD karaoke but they are not as quick and easy to produce as cheap simple CDG also i believe there are different royalties etc

so we seem to be stuck with a format that is antiquated but has a massive back catalogue and is easily digitised ...there have been variants of CDG with super CDG etc but these never took off .



great advice Daniel and its good to get different perspectives .

You can on karaoke creation software use any font , i have made a few own tracks using helvetica and simple colors.

the fact is most of these companies dont want to pay for a Designer so you get a clip art kids bedroom result :(

Hard to say,

I don't like the BIG logos of Sunfly and Mr Entertainer, that take up more then ¾ of the area. Also if it can't be done right (the excuse of limited resolution and colour space), then you might as well not put it.

and that mess at the bottom of SBI is just dumb (though the logo at the top looks good and is the right size)

Sing to the world is just boring

and

The music factory is both boring and a bad choice of colours

I think Zoom looks half decent (I guess a blue box makes all the difference?)

but I would pick the Soundchoice as the best even though I agree with Daniel and the TNR font should be changed as well as the colour (that purple is a bad choice), if I was touching it up a bit I would also shrink the "In the style of" by a point or two.