Yesterday I updated to Adobe CC 2015 and couldn’t wait to try out the much anticipated new features in Photoshop. This is coming from someone who uses Illustrator almost exclusively these days by the way. Without further ado, let’s have a look at what I thought were the most interesting ones.

Design Space

Design Space looks like it’s the slimmed down version of Photoshop, that screen designers in particular have been waiting for. You can toggle between the regular view and the new mode quite easily which is neat. In order to have access to this new space, you have to switch it on in the preferences panel as this is still considered a “technology preview feature”.
Since a video tells more than a thousand words, I encourage you to check out this screencast commented by Photoshop Senior Product Manager Zorana Gee:

Artboards

You’ve seen them in Illustrator and you might have seen them in Sketch. Now they’re finally available in Photoshop. What I like about their implementation is that the Artboard panel is similar to Sketch which is what I’m used to. Besides that, nothing much to see here so move along.

Stacked layer styles

Similar to Illustrator’s Graphic Styles panel, Photoshop now allows you to have as many as 10 instances of gradient overlay, colour overlay, drop shadow, inner shadow and stroke. You can add these either to a single layer or a layer group and edit them at any time. I’m surprised there is a cap, but it makes sense from a performance perspective.

Export as

This option is replacing the well-known Save for Web which is labeled legacy and should disappear fairly soon. I used plug-ins like PNG Express or Slicy for exporting PNG’s in the past, but this should do just fine when it comes to automated exporting, without having to rely on third party software. Be warned that it doesn’t allow to export slices anymore if you’re into that kind of thing.

Glyph panel

Some may not even care about this addition at all, but if you appreciate typography you will love the glyph panel which allows you to browse all available glyphs in a font, view alternatives and basically have fun with OpenType features. InDesign has it, Illustrator has it and Photoshop was long overdue.

Why Photoshop though?

I’d argue that Adobe has been focusing their attention on the wrong software for the past couple of years. Killing off Fireworks a while back infuriated many web designers, many of which have since moved on to the competition. Now turning Photoshop into something it wasn’t meant to be in the first place is a huge undertaking. At least it shows that the company has been actively listening to the community, even if all the new Sketch evangelists this might come as too little too late. However I’m very surprised that product isn’t getting more attention from Adobe. Seriously.
What about Illustrator? A few improvements could really push it over the top and make us forget about Photoshop entirely. It’s arguably the best software (next to Sketch) to address mobile and responsive web design that we have right now.

Consider this:

• Artboards have been around since 2009
• It has Layers just like Photoshop
• It has Graphic Styles
• It has Symbols
• It is vector-based

Khoi Vinh recently conducted an unofficial survey among design teams in New York City on the State of Design Tools. It turns out that while Photoshop is still widely used, Illustrator is not far behind.

Adobe Illustrator is surprisingly popular. It used to be rare, at least in my experience, to find digital designers who used Illustrator, but in one of the bigger surprise findings from our visits, we encountered a sizeable contingent of folks for whom Illustrator is their tool of choice. This seems to be a function of the popularity of responsive design, for which Illustrator’s support for multiple artboards is well suited, and Retina screens, for which Illustrator’s vector-based tools are a natural fit.

This 2015 update is certainly a step in the right direction and should keep many designers satisfied for some time. As far as I’m concerned, Illustrator will remain my go-to design software until something better comes along. There’s always next year, right?

I stumbled upon this video about the possible future of touch screens by Chris Harrison from CMU and found it amazing. You can see him demonstrating their TouchTools and TapSense apps for tablets.

The device they put together is able to achieve something really cool: anticipating what a user wants to do next. By positioning their hand as if they were actually holding a physical object over the glass users get access to that same object except on screen. In fact, the smart screen recognises the grip unique to a product and its intended use.

While some of the examples shown may provide little real-world use, such as a camera or a mouse, this little experiment makes you think about all the possibilities associated with this type of technology.

What I find even more impressive though, is the precise recognition of different types of touch input such as fingertip or knuckle by the device. This opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of interface interactions, as a single button could output various results depending the nature of the touch and essentially triple the amount of possible actions on a given screen.
I can’t think of a current app that would directly benefit from this, except for something like Knock maybe. And even then it’s a long shot.
Nevertheless, it’s going to be really interesting to explore new ways to interact with screens in the future.

As you may have noticed, these days it’s not enough anymore if you only provide static mockups as a designer. People have come to expect more and rightfully so. Those people being a mix of developers, clients or stakeholders you end up working with at some point or another of a project.

With the emergence of new tools created specifically for interactive prototyping, another layer of complexity has been added to a designer’s job. Last year alone, a handful of these were released trying to overtake Facebook’s Origami/Quartz Composer reign. But with this new layer also comes a great opportunity to design and communicate more efficiently.
In this post I’ll lay out the benefits of including prototypes into your workflow.

Why should you prototype?

Just because you haven’t felt the need to build prototypes in the past that doesn’t mean it can’t improve the way you design right now. As with many things in life, it’s never too late to get started. Lucky you!
Anyways, my short answer to this broad question would be something along the lines of: “Because it’s not only useful but really fun!”
For the longer answer you can keep on reading.

Test early, test often

The main reason for me to jump into prototypes in the early stages of a project is to try out interactions and see if they make sense from a user perspective. Testing your app concept thoroughly in the early stages is invaluable. It allows you to discover possible shortcomings or issues you haven’t even thought of before.
As strange as it may sound, the more mistakes you make at this point, the better. Your prototype is nothing more than a disposable sketch anyway.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

Building on the previous step, identifying a problem allows you to revise your design decisions in order to find something that might be more suitable for the issue at hand. After all it’s just another canvas for you to play on. Again, your prototype is nothing more than a digital sketchbook and you should treat it that way. It’s in your best interest explore several options before going ahead with the final design. Who knows what great solution you may end up with after some tinkering?

I’ve found myself literally just playing around with different ideas on the fly, just because ideas could be discarded guilt-free and that felt pretty good. In fact, this is where I encourage you to go over the top with your designs because once the project goes into production, nobody will want you to try out an alternative way to implement that navigation drawer. Trust me.

Communicate with your team

Whenever a developer asks “What happens if you tap here?” pointing at your wireframes, you can simply pull out your prototype and walk him through the interactions of the app. This saves everyone time and your developer will be able to understand exactly what you mean. No more guessing or misunderstandings because initial instructions were too vague. No confusion = good.

Lastly, keep in mind that a prototype can and should generate spontaneous feedback from your team. Since it’s not the finished product, I’ve found that people are more inclined to critique a prototype as only little time was spent creating it in the first place.

Hopefully this made you want to get started with your own interactive prototypes. In another post I’ll write about the current tools we have at our disposal and why I prefer one over the others.

Dropping these here because I found them quite cool and you might, too!

• Luke Wroblewski explains what we should be thinking about when Designing for Large Screen Smartphones

• A Flat Surface Shader that allows you to play around with lighting in 2D

• The zoom-effect of Apple’s iMac page dissected on this Codepen

• Coolors, a super fast color scheme generator

• Behind the scenes of a typeface — Domaine Sans Design Information by Klim Type Foundy

• Article: The End Of Apps As We Know Them

• Video: Adrian Zumbrunnen — Rethinking Content Creation

• Article: Apple on Hamburger Menus

• The evolution of the Yelp logo

• Ambition, a brilliant short film by Platige Image and ESA.

• 100,000 Stars — a Chrome experiment

I recently had the pleasure of attending a Glug event here in Auckland and thought I’d share several snippets of knowledge that stuck with me.

For those of you who don’t (yet) know what Glug is all about, I’ve got you covered:

“Glug is a series of events for the design and creative community established around 2007. Based around a series of talks and informal networking, Glug has become one of the most exciting, credible and well attended creative events around.”

So this thing has been around for many years and is just now slowly taking off in New Zealand from what I’ve gathered.

Nathan James Cooper

First up was Nathan James Cooper, who is a Digital Director at TBWA and also runs the blog rubbishcorp among other things.
This was probably the most genuine and entertaining talk of the evening, as the crowd attentively listened to every piece of advice they were offered.

When talking about his own journey, Nathan stressed the importance of side projects, especially for those working in a creative industry. We don’t always get to do what we want during our day job, since we’re not the only ones involved in it. There are compromises to be made and that’s okay. And here is where side projects come in to fill that creative gap. If you spend 50% of your creative energy at work, you still have 50% to spend on a project you really like, without having to please anyone but yourself in your free time. How cool is that?

For these side projects to take shape, however, you have to stop being lazy and do something. Try out new stuff - who cares if it doesn’t work out.

“If you”re going to fail, fail fast.”

Instead of holding onto a lingering project for several years in hopes that it might amount to something, it’s best to go all in from the start and move on if it fails. After all, the more stuff you make, the more chances you have of at least one turning out decent, right?

He also touched on the 80/20 rule, which goes against any perfectionist’s mindset.
To sum it up, if you are in the process of getting good at something, it ought to be enough to settle for 80% mastery of that thing. Supposedly, trying to close the gap from 80% to 100% in order to reach perfection is a waste of both time and energy since those 20% more won’t really make any difference in the big picture.
In fact, at this stage you could just be satisfied with your current skill level and move on to learn new skills instead.

Casey Eden

Next up was Casey Eden, the co-founder of Neighbourly, who shared insights about the start-up life and his business practices.
Among the more surprising revelations was the absolute transparency at his company. In fact all employees know pretty much everything business-related about their colleagues. Yes, even salary.

Some of the points he made were already mentioned by Nathan so I won’t repeat myself here.

Mike Van De Elzen

The final speaker for the evening, famous chef Michael Van De Elzen, looked back on his old lifestyle when he ran the Molten Restaurant. He realised how much his job had taken over his life which slowly led to unhealthy habits such as regular 100-hour weeks, lack of exercise and overall stress.
He solved this problem by learning to let go little by little without having to be in control of everything all the time.

Even though success comes at a price, he reached a point where his hard work hurt him more than it helped him, so Mike took a step back and looked at the bigger picture.

His new life style is more relaxed and he enjoys family time much more than before, even though that doesn’t stop him from having many new projects in the pipeline which include a new book on healthy cooking for busy people.

So there you have it. I just realised that there is a big disparity between my recaps, but that doesn’t mean I did not enjoy what everyone had to say. There’s only so much one can remember in a single night.