Natron Design Documentation
Welcome to the Natron Design Docs! These guidelines are intended to form the basis of designing for Natron, the open-source VFX and compositing software. Natron offers a comprehensive suite of tools for any compositor, enabling everything from basic video manipulation to cinematic multi-pass compositing. We believe that design is an integral part of establishing Natron as a fully-featured, professional compositing suite, and we have carefully put together these docs for that reason. As with all parts of Natron, these docs are a living document, and are freely available under an open-source license.
Why Design?
You might wonder why an open-source project like Natron would require designers. Surely, the features of the application are more important! So why waste valuable time on design?
Because open-source projects, especially ones like Natron, can have great potential. However, without good design, we have no way of showing that potential. There is a world of difference between open-source software with good design - like VS Code or Atom - and software with bad design. If Natron can aspire to professional design standards, we can realize that untapped potential. And we can release the amazing, community-building power of free and open-source software.
Conversely, users also have finite time and effort. They don't have all day to spend, looking for a compositing application, nor do they have the effort to extensively test each and every compositing application for its features. Most won't even care about free and open-source. And if they are presented with a terrible-looking user interface, they're not likely to want to use it. Even if they have to use it on a daily basis, using software with terrible GUIs – something Sibelius/Vim is famous for – becomes a pain.
Plus, design isn't just an aesthetical need - it's a practical one, too. Accessibility and responsive design are no longer optional in today's day and age. If your website isn't designed to scale properly on a mobile device, or to accomodate the needs of disadvantaged users, you are excluding a massive number of people from using your site.
Our Guiding Principles
We want to show that open-source projects and good design are not mutually exclusive. In other words, we want to:
- Create immersive and engaging experiences that breathe life into Natron
- Create a recognizable visual identity that will represent our project
- Laying down a foundation of intuitive tools that make Natron stand apart from the crowd
Translating these abstract guiding principles something tangible is what design aims to do. The implementation is the hard part, but it's also what ultimately counts, and that's what we will discuss in these docs.
Getting Started
This guide is intended for developers, hobbyists, professional designers, and novices alike. It's meant to take you into the mind of a designer, while also keeping design simple and easy to understand. If you're interested in those topics, read on!
Implementation Guide
Natron's Approach to Design
Here at Natron, we face tremendous challenges in encorporating design. We have a small design team, limited monetary resources, and Natron is non-profit. Furthermore, as an open-source project, we have high standards to live up to. Out of these special circumstances, we developed a unique approach to design.
First, where possible, we rely on open standards to share, work, and publish designs. Regardless of the software we use to make our mockups, we share designs as widely-supported SVG files. Then, we use git to synchronize our design assets (SVG or otherwise) to GitHub. That means we can do awesome things - like time travel! Designers can make breaking changes sometimes. But thanks to GitHub's version control, we can go back in time and grab the unchanged version, without a hitch!