Why am I not surprised that the Apple Developer website got hacked and account info stolen? Their developer site has always been, to me, a horribly engineered site that made very little sense and was extremely restrictive. It seems painfully obvious the site wasn’t thought out before it was built, so I’m not at all surprised it was hacked; I’m only surprised it took this long. In all fairness though, things were starting to look up for that site, since they finally added a way to transfer an app from one company account to another. Why it took them 6 years, I don’t know.

While we’re on the subject, why do I get the sneaking suspicion that Jony Ives’s bizarre iOS 7 design is about to be the next trend in web design? If neon colors and gradients become the latest thing, maybe I’ll just call it quits, hehe. But anyway, I guess the skeumorphism thing has been overplayed as of late, especially by Apple.

Other than that, I dig the new iOS. Definitely a step in the right direction, at least.

All you graphic designers out there, I’m about to rock your world. Your professors, art directors, and magazines have been telling you wrong all these years about CMYK. Here’s the real scoop.

Starting your print documents in CMYK is bad. Really bad. It’s like starting a web image as a JPEG. Let’s think about this.

• CMYK has an vastly inferior color gamut to RGB
• CMYK takes up more file size
• RGB is considerably faster at processing
• Most Photoshop filters and adjustments don’t work in CMYK, or work unpredictably
• If you want to adapt this image for web later on (which these days is likely), you’ll wish it was in RGB
• Besides gamut restrictions, you’re not getting an accurate portrayal of the actual printed output, anyway
• These days, your output probably won’t even be in pure CMYK, but hexachrome, which can probably do more with your RGB file than with CMYK.
• CMYK therefore is lossy, causing irreversible damage to your future workflow

The truth is, CMYK mode isn’t much more than a tool to help the designer visualize the restrictions of CMYK. I suspect that CMYK probably holds a slightly better gradation of colors even if the gamut is clipped, but then again, if it’s that big of a deal, you could use 16 bit RGB instead. But even though it’s a helpful tool, it’s also destroying any future prospects of your image being used elsewhere in the real world. Simply put, print is dying and web is much more important these days, so it seems fair to assume that you shouldn’t prematurely limit yourself to a CMYK color space, for fear of shooting yourself in the foot later on.

So then, what is CMYK good for? Well, again, it’s like a JPEG. You should save it in that format once you are completely done, and do not overwrite your source files. In other words, keep the RGB PSD file, and render your CMYK print version to PSD or TIFF (TIFF is a dying format though these days). CMYK should be the last thing on your list before saving for print.

“But converting my RGB image to CMYK will make my image all muddy looking!”
Only if you’re a beginner designer and don’t know what colors can and can’t fit the gamut. And at any rate, it’s more or less an optical illusion; It’ll be fine when it’s printed–it wouldn’t have been able to use those bright RGB colors anyway, so get over it.

“But this will affect my subtle gradations and other visual benefits of starting in CMYK.”
Look– your end user and/or client won’t notice these subtleties, and they won’t give a crap either, unless you’re designing for National Geographic, or an art magazine, or something. Use 16 bit color if you want slightly better gradients. And anyway, you actually can visualize how it’ll look in CMYK without actually using CMYK mode. Check out “View → Proof Colors” in Photoshop. You’re welcome. 🙂

“But I have to know how it will look in print!”
Do you think web designers need to know how JPEG artifacts or PNG color banding will look while they’re designing the image? Do you think they mess with color profiles or calibration to try to get the colors exact on every web browser? Those would all be an exercise in futility. Your colors will never be 100% the same for everyone. We know this, and it doesn’t bother us. It shouldn’t bother you either.

I know the truth hurts, but these days there is almost never a good reason to start in CMYK. Don’t sabotage your workflow. Work smart–use RGB and only switch modes towards the end. Or better yet, if your final work is in InDesign, you can let InDesign do the final color conversion instead of doing it to every image in Photoshop.

Happy Photoshopping.

This won’t really be anything you haven’t heard already, but I feel like I really need to voice these concerns.

I know I don’t speak for every UX designer out there, but there seem to be a lot of troubling aspects of the Metro UI that I’m having a hard time justifying. Notably, eyeflow. When tiles are laid out in a linear fashion, the eyeflow is simple. Left to right, top to bottom. That’s what we do in Western Civilization; it comes natural. But when you have small-sized icons, medium size, large size, double-wide, etc. as tiles, your brain can no longer read in a linear fashion. It sees the big one first. Then maybe the medium or doublewides. Then the small icons. What order do you see them in? Who knows. Maybe the colorful ones–but wait, they’re all colorful. Your brain will fight with your eyes over what should be seen first, which creates a stressful experience for the user.

So then the question becomes, what was Microsoft trying to accomplish in order to improve upon the system that was already in place? Good question… I’m still trying to figure that out. Some icons are big. Some are small. I can see that maybe you’d want the most used icons to be big, but does it really matter that much? Or at all? Does it make sense for one icon to take up the same real estate of 8 others? So then, the colors. Great, color coding. I assume that blue could mean web, orange could be productivity, green for games? Nope. It’s entirely random, apparently. So then what is the point of having candy colored buttons strewn all over the place in various shapes, sizes, and colors? I’m just not following it.

The other issue I have is with their obvious end goal, which is merging the user experience across phones, tablets, and desktops. It seems like it would be a worthy endeavor, and perhaps it can be done, but that doesn’t mean that Windows 8 is doing it right.

Let’s take my personal use cases. On my smartphone is Android 2.3. It has a desktop. With same-sized icons. It has a drag-down bar with a list of recent programs and notifications (the equivalent to a taskbar and icon tray). It has a button at the bottom that slides out a list of applications (you know, a “start menu”). I’m able to do everything I need to do, using this system. At home I have Windows 7. It has a desktop, same-sized icons, a taskbar, and a start menu. The experience is virtually identical, besides the lack of notification list and a different approach to multitasking–but that’s okay, it makes some sense that I would have different needs on a desktop versus smartphone. But in the case of Windows 8, it seems to want to force a unified “jack of all trades and master of none” experience across all devices. No device has just icons. No device has a start menu. All implementations are based on utilization of touch. On a desktop, this is especially silly. Who’s gonna sit there with their arms in the air to use Excel, Word, and Visual Studio? Who needs the calculator taking up their entire 22 inch monitor? And to top it all off, providing both a Metro mode and classic mode to create an utterly segregated, confusing mess of an experience.

It appears to me that Microsoft went the same route as iOS in the reimagining of Windows (the dreaded “let’s just do what Apple is doing and call it innovation” move in Silicon Valley). iOS also has merged the start menu into the desktop, for instance. I would imagine the reasoning behind this was for simplicity’s sake, and lack of screen real estate. For the record, I disagree with the decision. A desktop should be for human-organized shortcuts and unfiled folders and documents. A start menu should be your entirety of installed applications. It seems like Microsoft is trying to copy this idea, the idea being, why have both when you can merge the two? Because it creates a mess, that’s why.

I remember when Windows 1-3 was using windows of grouped icons (that’s why they called it “Windows”) on the desktop instead of filing them in a start menu or just having the commonly-used desktop icons. When I was a kid and Windows 95 came out, I was upset at first, but then I realized I didn’t use most of those icons, so they didn’t need to be taking up my desktop all the time. Apparently, Microsoft has done a complete 180 and decided to pile everything back on the desktop again, so what was 20 years old is new again. Now my beloved desktop experience is gone, and instead I’m being forced to use a tablet experience. Instead of a few icons on a clean desktop, I have every program I own and barely use, mixed with live gaming icons I don’t use, next to a web browser I don’t use, with social networking tiles that are completely useless, and other garbage I just plain don’t use. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that banking your flagship product on popular smartphone and tablet interfaces is going to turn out to be a huge mistake. The quicker Microsoft admits this, the quicker they can get back to selling Windows again.