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macOS prefs tab icons are 27×27pt
When designing icons, knowing the final size they’ll be displayed can drastically improve rendering quality, because it allows points to be snapped to pixel boundaries.When the elements of an icon are...
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Diagnosing common colour management issues
When working with colours, it can be common for their appearance to change unexpectedly when viewed in different design tools, or when moved from a design tool into production code. Colours may become...
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Design tool performance signatures
When pushed, how do various design tools utilise the hardware they’re running on? In other words, if you were to choose specs for a new Mac to be used for design, what should you focus on?One way to...
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Opacity precision
Opacity is usually measured as a percentage in design tools, with zero percent being fully transparent, and one hundred percent being fully opaque.While easy to understand, using integer percentages...
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Camera iris icon speedrun
When viewing my vector icon speedruns, it can be difficult to see precisely what’s going on. Everything happens quickly, with many actions triggered via keyboard shortcuts, and Illustrator’s interface...
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Mac external displays for designers and developers, part 2
Since writing about Mac external displays in 2016, not much has changed. LG, Dell, Samsung, and other display makers have either never catered for the specs many Mac designers and developers want, or...
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Ideal SVG exports
The following article is a random collection of opinions on how design tools should export SVGs. Do you agree? Feel free to let me know if you think something is missing or incorrect.The XML...
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SVG passthrough precision
If an SVG is imported into a design tool, then immediately exported as another SVG, how much precision is kept? What’s added, removed, or altered?To test rounding precision, an SVG can be created with...
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Designing macOS menu bar extras
Apple’s HIG is great, but it doesn‘t contain much information related to designing menu bar extras. This article aims to provide additional details and context needed to create icons for macOS menu bar...
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Flag icon speedrun
When viewing my vector icon speedruns, it can be difficult to see precisely what’s going on. Everything happens quickly, with many actions triggered via keyboard shortcuts, and Illustrator’s interface...
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Pushpin icon speedrun
When viewing my vector icon speedruns, it can be difficult to see precisely what’s going on. Everything happens quickly, with many actions triggered via keyboard shortcuts, and Illustrator’s interface...
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Fountain pen icon speedrun
When viewing my vector icon speedruns, it can be difficult to see precisely what’s going on. Everything happens quickly, with many actions triggered via keyboard shortcuts, and Illustrator’s interface...
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Fingerprint icon speedrun
When viewing my vector icon speedruns, it can be difficult to see precisely what’s going on. Everything happens quickly, with many actions triggered via keyboard shortcuts, and Illustrator’s interface...
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Icon speedrun videos
I’m excited to announce the launch of my new YouTube channel, which will feature videos that cover the types of topics you’d expect as Bjango articles.It’s also likely to follow a similar schedule as...
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Smaller Mac app icons
In an effort to reduce the final app size of iStat Menus, we’ve been investigating ways to slim down our app icon. It’s currently about 1.22MB, which is normal for an app icon, but a decent percentage...
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Formulas for optical adjustments
A long-standing trope of the design world is that computers are bad at aligning and balancing the relative scales of elements. This is incorrect.Nudging elements around until they feel good is...
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Shape builder vs pathfinder
In Adobe Illustrator, the shape builder tool and the pathfinder panel can both add and and subtract segments of overlapping shapes. They’re predominantly used to create complex shapes from simple...
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Design tool memory usage
How do various design tools utilise memory? What’s their baseline usage with no documents open? How does memory grow with lots of large documents open?Empty documentsThe graph below shows what happens...
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Design tool canvas handles
Design tools often pack a lot of functionality around the bounding box of selected objects. Some of this functionality is represented by handles or icons, but a lot of it is hidden.This can make...
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Blur radius comparison
The most common type of blur used on the web and in design tools is Gaussian blur. There’s many ways to describe how blurry the blur is, and implementations vary so much that a blur in one app may be a...
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