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Colour management, part 3
I believe colour management is an essential feature for professional design tools — being able to rely on what you’re seeing when choosing colours, deciding on contrast, and assessing legibility is critical. In the last two articles, we covered the basics of colour management. In this article, we’ll detail the settings required for screen design in many popular design tools.
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Colour management, part 2
Previously, we discussed how colour spaces are similar to units of measurement. While “50” has no absolute physical characteristic, “50cm” does. Combining a value and a unit of measurement gives it more meaning, and removes ambiguity. Colour spaces are a bit more complex than units of length, but the analogy can be used to understand many aspects of colour management.
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Colour management, part 1
If someone asked you to build a coffee table and they specified the legs as a height of 50, what do you think that would mean? 50 kilometres? 50 feet? 50 inches? 50 millimetres? Probably 50 centimetres. You can’t know for sure, but you can guess, based on the table’s intended use — 50 kilometres, 50 feet, and 50 inches are way too big for a coffee table, and 50 millimetres is way too small.
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Vector icon speed runs
It’s common to have to draw the same kinds of icons over and over — many different apps and websites use similar glyphs, but each instance typically needs to be tweaked for size and style, so they need to be redrawn.
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My Mac app icon design workflow
My favourite Mac app icons are simple enough to be easily read in the Dock, yet they contain interesting details when viewed up close. They have large vibrant areas of colour, yet they contain enough contrast and shading to give them a sense of volume.
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Displays for designers and developers
If you’re considering an external display for your Mac, there’s a few important decisions to make. Apple doesn’t sell external displays any more, so you can’t just default to their wisdom. That’s an issue, because not all displays are well suited for Macs.
Design
Displays for designers and developers
Why I don’t use PDFs for iOS assets
Creating palettes with adjustment layers
Images and the macOS Color Picker
Skala
Photoshop
Batch processing with Generator
Photoshop CC 2015 improvements
Photoshop’s gradient positioning
2014: Smart Objects and Layer Comps