Thoughts on silkscreen for PCBs?

[geertroumen]

Hey,

I'm an interaction designer with some nerdy interest in the developer experience. Here I want to share a proposal for a redesign of the esp32-s3-devkit, but mostly open a discussion on what you think is good silkscreen and how we could improve the field to make more user friendly experiences for both beginners and experts by thinking about visual design.

I wrote an article on medium on this topic, and I'm curious about your responses.

[username]

Of course your is better. I am still trying to figure out, what PCB house allows multiple colors.

[geertroumen]

Both PCBway and JLCPCB allow coloured silkscreen. It is not multiple layers of colour but actually more like an inkjet printer.

https://jlcpcb.com/news/multi-color-silkscreen-pcb

https://www.pcbway.com/blog/News/Unlock ... 9d559.html

Below is the JLC pcb colour service; and normal black soldermask with white silkscreen. Colour comes with some downsides:
- White outline around copper areas (there is a base layer which is white)
- Normal silkscreen looks sharper; is more readable and less 'dotted' surfaces are nicely filled.
- Colorful silk screen needs bigger or bolder text to have the same readability.
- For normal silkscreen: make sure that inverted areas need extreme bold text to make it readable and visually match up with the non-inverted areas)

[Sprite]

I'd really be mindful of the price point I'd sell this at.

The thing is: most people pick up electronics as a hobby pretty early on in their lives, when money is somewhat tight and time more in abundance. ESP32 boards are great then because you can get no-name ESP32 devboards for next to nothing at the usual places. If your board is going to cost more than that (and it likely is, if only because you initially won't be able to shift the volumes the existing manufacturers can) the added value needs to be worth it, and I can entirely understand a lot of people going 'I won't pay three times the price just to save me a few trips to the datasheet'.

Maybe later on, they'll figure out the use of the silkscreen, but by then I imagine they already know the pitfalls well enough not to need them spelled out on the silkscreen anymore.