944 turbo gauges prototype
12-19-2012, 05:14 PM
#1
Racer
Thread Starter
944 turbo gauges prototype
I drew up some white faced gauges for my Porsche 944 turbo. I wanted metric numbers as the predominate speed but also retain MP/H. I added color to visualize the gauges better.
You will notice that the first segment of speeds are odd numbers. That is because the popular speeds for my region are 30, 50, 70, 100. I added a green buffer zone of 10 km/h in those ranges. That way in a 50 zone I know that when I'm in the green I'm between 50-60, which is a safe speed.
I also added color zones for the tach which represent the power band of my car.
Also did some other little color designs for temperature and oil pressure.
Tell me what you guys think.
Ryan
You will notice that the first segment of speeds are odd numbers. That is because the popular speeds for my region are 30, 50, 70, 100. I added a green buffer zone of 10 km/h in those ranges. That way in a 50 zone I know that when I'm in the green I'm between 50-60, which is a safe speed.
I also added color zones for the tach which represent the power band of my car.
Also did some other little color designs for temperature and oil pressure.
Tell me what you guys think.
Ryan
Last edited by Ryan_U; 12-21-2012 at 01:28 PM.
12-19-2012, 05:55 PM
#3
Cool!
As far as design philosophy goes, you've got an inconsistency. The Voltmeter uses orange tick-marks for the 'warning' zone, whereas all other gauges have black tick-marks (regardless of zone) and orange fill for 'warning' zone. This would be fine if you wanted to draw attention to the voltmeter, say if it is your favorite gauge. However I doubt it's your favorite gauge. And if you have a favorite gauge, it should stand out more than just some different colored marks.
Are you going towards the functionality end or form end? If the former, the fill marks on the Tach would be pointless, I don't know who looks at their Tach to see whether or not they're in the powerband. Whereas on the Speedo they are more useful.
Since it's for your own personal car, I think you should add some more personal touch. I.e. look at the gauges of the Singer 911. The Tach face is a different color than all others, and also has a silhouette of a face, don't know who. (No affiliation with above-linked site, or Singer)
That's my extremely over-thought out response. Please note this is NOT to offend you in any way - but rather provide contructive criticism.
BTW Your main speedo unit is kilometers but the odo reads miles. Assuming it's because your car was originally delivered with imperial units?
You want the design in vector format (or VERY high reolustion), otherwise you'll see the pixelation.
Take care and happy holidays!
As far as design philosophy goes, you've got an inconsistency. The Voltmeter uses orange tick-marks for the 'warning' zone, whereas all other gauges have black tick-marks (regardless of zone) and orange fill for 'warning' zone. This would be fine if you wanted to draw attention to the voltmeter, say if it is your favorite gauge. However I doubt it's your favorite gauge. And if you have a favorite gauge, it should stand out more than just some different colored marks.
Are you going towards the functionality end or form end? If the former, the fill marks on the Tach would be pointless, I don't know who looks at their Tach to see whether or not they're in the powerband. Whereas on the Speedo they are more useful.
Since it's for your own personal car, I think you should add some more personal touch. I.e. look at the gauges of the Singer 911. The Tach face is a different color than all others, and also has a silhouette of a face, don't know who. (No affiliation with above-linked site, or Singer)
That's my extremely over-thought out response. Please note this is NOT to offend you in any way - but rather provide contructive criticism.
BTW Your main speedo unit is kilometers but the odo reads miles. Assuming it's because your car was originally delivered with imperial units?
You want the design in vector format (or VERY high reolustion), otherwise you'll see the pixelation.
Take care and happy holidays!
Last edited by FrenchToast; 12-19-2012 at 06:29 PM.
12-20-2012, 09:55 AM
#4
Racer
Thread Starter
Not offended at all. This is exactly the kind of critique I was looking for. Very constructive. I was just toying around with a few ideas to see what works or not. My pod is in imperial units now but I want to get a metric speedometer . I can barely see what speed I am going and at night, I'm guesstemating with a 50% margin of error. I'm thinking of toning down the colors a little and fixing some inconsistencies. The original file is of much higher resolution.
12-20-2012, 01:58 PM
#6
Drifting
I'm in the middle of a gauge cluster project and I've tried a bunch of different gauge face colors. What I did was print gauge faces in various colors and put them in my prototyping cluster and reinstalled the needles. With everything together, I could see what looked good to me and what didn't. I'd suggest you do the same, and I'd recommend printing it on matte photo paper in a color laser printer if possible.
I absolutely hated white. There's no way I could live with it every day. Yellow and orange weren't much better. Out of all the colors I tried, black ended up being my favorite (seems like an awful lot of effort just to arrive back at the stock color). I also liked dark green (yes, really), dark blue and dark red. It was very apparent that the darker the color, the more I liked it, and the more the orange needles stood out against the background.
Right now I'm waiting on my new gauge faces to arrive. I'll post up some pictures of them when they get here, but they look stock. I only made a couple of very subtle changes.
I absolutely hated white. There's no way I could live with it every day. Yellow and orange weren't much better. Out of all the colors I tried, black ended up being my favorite (seems like an awful lot of effort just to arrive back at the stock color). I also liked dark green (yes, really), dark blue and dark red. It was very apparent that the darker the color, the more I liked it, and the more the orange needles stood out against the background.
Right now I'm waiting on my new gauge faces to arrive. I'll post up some pictures of them when they get here, but they look stock. I only made a couple of very subtle changes.
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12-20-2012, 07:54 PM
#8
Nordschleife Master
No affil: http://www.white-face-gauges.com/html/porsche_996_997_boxster_s_whit.html
12-21-2012, 05:48 PM
#13
Instructor
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I like the black a lot better. Three things I might change: the labels on the fuel gauge are odd. 4/4 and 1/2 don't have and coherent scheme to them. Why not 2/2 and 1/2? Better yet, just leave it off; you know what it means. I'd also like to see 1V ticks on the voltmeter. I think the reason it's not like that from the factory is just that it's not very accurate anyway, but it might be nice to have. Finally, putting dots on the speedo that correspond to redline in various gears is a neat idea that helps get a feel for shift points. I think I've seen this on a mercedes; kind of a cool feature and not very visually intrusive.
