Weighing Sketch and Photoshop

A few of us on the Etsy design team have started using Sketch instead of Adobe Photoshop for UI design. It took some getting used to, but I’ve been getting very comfortable working with Sketch’s distinctly un-Adobe-like approach to crafting interfaces, in particular the way it delivers all the advantages of working with vector graphics while producing results that are indistinguishable from raster graphics.

I’m planning on posting more of my thoughts on my transition to Sketch soon, but yesterday, when Adobe notified me of an update to Photoshop, I was reminded of another reason why I prefer Sketch so much.

Photoshop vs. Sketch

On the left is the update screen for Photoshop. This particular software patch weighs in at 129 MB — just for the update. Sketch itself weighs in at less than a tenth; just 12 MB — that’s for the entirety of the app, the whole megillah; not just a software update.

You can argue that Photoshop needs to be bigger because it does so much more, but that is just the point. It does too much for my taste, and I’m a little tired of paying the freight costs of all those features I don’t need: the slowness, the crashes, the progressively exploitive pricing. I’m really enjoying Sketch’s more streamlined feature set, and how it is clearly purpose-built for designing user interfaces. Simpler tools are very often better tools.

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Window Air Conditioning Has a Long History of Sucking

Last night I wondered aloud on Twitter why window-based air conditioning units are so poorly designed, and why the technology seems so primitive. The average window unit, circa 2013, more or less resembles its forbears from decades ago: it’s still noisy, inelegant, heavy, and it looks like it was designed as a set dressing for “Logan’s Run.”

It was sort of an idle tweet, but it garnered a surprisingly fervent response. There seems to be broad agreement not only that these machines seem hopelessly stranded in time, but also that that shouldn’t be the case. The fact that no James Dyson has reinvented the window unit is a surprise to nearly everyone. After all this is a market in the billions of dollars; if a crafty entrepreneur could create a product that successfully addresses even just a sliver of that, they’d be doing very well.

To me, this is one of the enduring mysteries of contemporary industrial design, which has over the past twenty years sought to reinvent, redesign or elevate out of commodity status almost every object in the home, from vacuum cleaners to thermostats to toaster ovens. The closest thing to innovation that the AC market seems to have produced is so-called ductless air conditioning, but those units don’t address the problem that most Westerners want to solve with window units: cool a room with a machine that costs less than US$1,000. Ductless AC units are significantly more expensive to buy and considerably more difficult to install. And perhaps as a result, they are nowhere near as prevalent as window units.

Anyway, when I wrote the tweet I felt like I’d been lamenting this situation for years. It also occurred to me that I might have blogged about it before. When I did a search on Subtraction.com I realized that was in fact the case — I first wrote about this back in 2003. Ten years later, nothing has changed. If you’d have told me back then that that would be the case, that even by 2013, no one would come along and solve this problem or grab this opportunity, I wouldn’t have believed you. I guess it just goes to show you how our supposedly torrid pace of change is sometimes not so speedy after all.

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The Tech Industry and the World Around It

Ratings

5 of 5 stars
What’s this?

George Packer’s article “Change the World” in the 27 May issue of The New Yorker is a thoughtful and damning survey of the tech industry’s political inclinations. It’s a must-read for anyone in startup land, but unfortunately the magazine’s publisher has shrouded it behind subscriber-only access, ensuring that its influence will be limited. (Condé Nast’s approach to digital access to its content still sets the industry standard for being inaccessible and user-unfriendly.)

Packer turns a cold eye on the tech industry at large, and on Silicon Valley and its environs specifically, questioning the true motivations behind and implications of countless companies’ collective desire to “change the world.” The Internet Age has made great breakthroughs and great wealth possible for virtually anyone who has the means to enter the fray of the technorati, but Packer argues that it has done scant little to truly improve the world around it. Tech companies create billions of dollars in real and virtual wealth, but the economy at large remains frustratingly sluggish, with incomes stagnant and employment barely growing. San Francisco, in particular, “is becoming a city without a middle class,” and private school enrollment soars in the Bay Area while public schools whither everywhere. Packer argues that the industry has come to believe that it can better the world by looking after itself first and last, effectively shirking any broader civic obligations, and that it generally regards government as a ruinous wasteland to be avoided and routed around, rather than as a means for social good.

I recommend you get your hands on this article in some form if you haven’t yet, but in the meantime you can get a taste for Packer’s sober and insightful reasoning in this follow-up blog post he wrote, which Condé has graciously made available to all comers. Packer’s original article appeared just before Yahoo acquired Tumblr and Tim Cook appeared before Congress to answer questions about Apple’s labyrinthine tax avoidance strategies, and he addresses both of those events in this blog post.

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Magazine

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

French publication Magazine has an interesting concept for its covers: their masthead takes the form of a removable and re-positionable sticker, leaving the cover image itself beautifully unadorned.

Magazine

See spreads Magazine at their Web site. I found this, by the way, over at the fantastic and frequently updated Cover Junkie, a showcase for current publication design. Totally worth adding to your regular rotation.

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When Designers Interview Engineers

The reality for most designers is that we are very likely to work at companies whose principal line of business is not design, but something else — media, services, widgets, what have you. This is slightly less true if you’re in the studio or agency world, but certainly if you do interaction or product design, you’re probably working in an environment that’s engineering-focused first, and design-focused second (or third). There’s a tech sector, but there’s no ‘design sector.’

Thankfully, as the design profession has matured designers have learned to assert themselves effectively in these situations. That includes having a say in the process of hiring new team members. Just as engineers and product managers (who more often than not come from engineering backgrounds) will often interview potential design hires, it’s becoming increasingly common for designers to interview engineering candidates too. I’ve done it a lot over the past several years, and it’s not uncommon at Etsy.

For designers though, interviewing an engineer does not always come naturally. In part this is because the language of engineering is so concrete and therefore more widely assimilated, and the language of design is comparatively soft and resigned to niches.

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Tail Wagging in Interface Design

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

A wonderfully argued indictment of skeuomorphism and its inherent falsity, by designer and developer Matt Gemell. It’s well worth a read, though I actually don’t fully agree with it. I’m working up to writing down my thoughts on the widespread distaste for skeuomorphism and the accompanying mania for ‘flat design.’ And when I say ‘working up to it’ I mean ‘trying to find the time.’ Anyway, Read Matt’s piece here.

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Creative Cloud Is Not Suite

Late in December of 2010, I paid US$750 (including taxes and shipping) for an upgrade copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5. I’m still using that software on my Mac at home, and find that it covers most all of my needs. If you amortize that cost out over the roughly thirty months that I’ve owned CS5, it comes to about US$25 per month.

When I first did this math, I expected that figure to be significantly lower than the cost for Adobe’s Creative Cloud software, which offers the same applications as the Creative Suite but via monthly subscription. Existing CS customers can subscribe to Creative Cloud for US$30 a month. Over the course of thirty months, that comes to about US$150 more than what I paid in December 2010. That’s not nothing, but it’s a fair price to pay considering that CC always provides the latest versions of Adobe’s software.

Of course, thirty months is an arbitrary number. I could probably use CS5 for another twelve months, at least, before I would really need to upgrade it. In so doing I’d effectively drive the price down to around US$18 a month, saving me US$510 over the cost of subscribing to Creative Cloud during that extended period of time.

However, as Adobe announced yesterday, going forward the only way to get access to the new versions of Adobe’s key software will be through a Creative Cloud subscription. If you want to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. now you must pay a monthly subscription fee. Which is to say, you can no longer buy a single, standalone version and let it amortize out over as long as you like.

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on each customer’s needs, of course. Some people will appreciate the ability to pay only for the months that they need. For businesses and startups, in particular, the ability to put a legal copy of Adobe’s apps in an employee’s hands for US$50 a month (the cost for new customers) instead of several hundred dollars is sure to be a boon.

But for folks like myself, who find that only every second or third of Adobe’s major releases truly warrants the financial and technological hassle of an upgrade, losing that option is not so appealing. It feels less like innovation and more like manipulation.

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UC.Quarterly

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

My general skepticism about print-based graphic design products continues, but I have to respect those who keep at it, and manage to turn them into worthwhile objects — and products, even. My friends at Under Consideration, for instance, have just launched UC.Quarterly, a periodical “summary of the most interesting, relevant, and simply fun-to-see projects published each quarter.” The projects are selected from UC’s network of sites about graphic design and branding.

UC.Quarterly
UC.Quarterly

I’ve got the first issue in my hands and it’s a super-fun read. There’s very little additional content beyond the project images themselves, but to me this is the print equivalent of browsing at your leisure through Dribbble or the design-related content on Pinterest. It’s inspiration fodder, basically.

Each issue is published via Newspaper Club, which offers custom, short-run printing on wonderfully casual, unpretentious newsprint. You can buy them for US$15 a pop or subscribe to a year’s worth for US$45. Get yours here.

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Ghost

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Ghost is a Kickstarter project to build a new blogging platform. As the incumbent applications like WordPress have become much broader in scope and therefore more complex than just a tool for publishing content, the Ghost team hopes to create something much more focused on writing, blogging and journalism. Their prototype and their marketing materials look preternaturally professional; if nothing else, I want this project to happen so I can see if it’s as slick as the screen grabs and demo video suggest. On the issue of whether creating the next major blogging platform is an anachronistic ambition or not, I leave it to the market to decide. See the demo and link off to the Kickstarter page at TryGhost.org.

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Best Headphones Ever

The best deal I’ve gotten lately is this pair of DJ-style headphones from the unassumingly fantastic technical retailer Monoprice.com, best known for selling incredibly cheap cables of all sorts. I’ve been a customer for years (and if you have any kind of cabling needs, you should be too), but I was surprised to realize lately that they are trying to branch out into more general consumer product categories.

Monoprice is tackling headphones and computer models — and soon high-end audio equipment, car audio, and home automation hardware — with the same pricing strategy that they brought to cables: they “try to make sure that we’re about fifty percent below what a retailer would be selling that product for.” In many cases, they easily clear this bar. The company’s earbud-style headphones, for instance, start at less than US$3 each. The headphones I bought cost just US$21. (Warning, each customer is allowed to buy just ten pairs. Sorry.)

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