There’s a good chance you, frequent Photoshop user, don’t help yourself to a very neat little organizational feature called Layer Comps. How may I be so bold as to venture such a guess? Well, I have yet to met a pixel-pusher who in fact uses Layer Comps. Q.E.D. etc. It’s a handy thingy, however, and I like it!
The example project I’ll be using here is an iPhone app, but the process is equally applicable to other UI designs, website layouts, posters, retouched photos, and anything else you might spend more than half an hour of clicking on.
What it’s for
Layer comps is a panel - found in the Window menu - which helps you organize different versions of a designs or different views of it in the same file. If you are a responsible digital citizen at all, you probably have some sort of system for keeping around alternate elements and various “views” of your app. Layer Comps will make this easier and more robust.
An iPhone app will typically have several views: a dashboard, a new-entry form, Settings, About. You could save each as a separate file, but what about all the elements these views share? If they have the same background or nav bar and you decide to change those, why go changing them in every file?
You could make groups within one document, or maybe you prefer just showing and hiding layers as you go; in fact this is the solution employed by most designers I know. It’s a little nuts, though! Pretty soon you’re showing and hiding dozens of layers all the time. That’s no fun.
Do this instead
Show and hide your layers, as per usual, to compose one view of your app - for instance, the layers needed to build the application startup image (a.k.a. default.png). Now reach for that Layer Comps panel and hit the New icon. Name the comp “Startup”. What happens is, Photoshop now remember the visibility, position, and style of all the layers in your document. No matter what changes to those properties you make, you can always high-five the little layout icon next to “Startup” in the Layer Comps panel to quickly switch to the document the way it was when you saved the comp.
You might think this is like History - it’s not. Layer Comps is a totally nondestructive, undo-agnostic thing. It’s just a shortcut for hiding layers, moving them around, and turning layer styles on and off. It takes the often frustrating fact that visibility settings aren’t undoable in Photoshop and turns it into a strength.
(Update: Matt Quintanilla points out you can undo visibility. Boy is that option ever discoverable!)
The plot thickens
So what happens if you, for example, delete a layer used in one of the saved comps? Photoshop knows better than to pretend it never happened - it’ll badge your comp with a little wtfdude.
This means the document state has changed and the comp doesn’t “make sense” fully. You can still switch to this comp, but you’ll get the warning until you select the comp in the list and hit the ugly Refresh icon. You can use that one at any point when the current visible state is what you want to update the selected comp to.
One more little thing: there’s a difference between selecting a comp by clicking its row and switching to it by clicking its icon. Selecting just lets you delete, update, or duplicate the comp. To actually change your view, you’ll want want to click the icon.
Two more littler thing: hey, you did know you can duplicate a layer - or pretty much any row in a list in Photoshop - by dragging it to the New icon in the panel, right? Just checking!
Good day and good comps to you, fellow designer.
From the band’s website, which includes a making-of video:
This Spring, we were on tour opening up for the B-52s, with shows all around the East Coast. One day while we were driving, Keith was browsing through the applications on the iPhone and came across FourTrack. We thought this app would be a great way to record song ideas while we are away from home. So we downloaded it, and I thought it would be a neat experiment to record the full band on a phone.
You could call me cynical for suspecting that part of the reason they did this was to get free publicity from Apple - which did happen - but I applaud The 88’s indie acumen.
Hi there! You - yes, you with the Twitter account. Check this - Birdfeed is a brand new Twitter client for your iPhone. It’s fast; it keeps a local store of your friends’ tweets so you can catch up on the twittergeist while you’re on the, err, elevator; it does all the usual fun shopwork of uploading pics, switching between multiple accounts, etc.; it’s as uncluttered as a Scandinavian rumpus room.
Birdfeed was designed by signed below and imagineered & engineered by that Jarvis Cocker of the indie Mac community, Buzz Andersen. Thanks for the memories, Buzz. And thank you for your time, gentle reader.
The cleverly named http://imacomputa.org is a brave person:
I realized about 5 years ago that at some point in the 80s, lots of the popular music started incorporating saxophone solos into their songs. Some of them are fine, but most of them are ridiculous to have in the songs. Below, I have attempted to separate the quality and appropriateness of the solos from what I think of the song as a whole.
It’s only in the last few years that I’ve managed to let the saxophone into my life. I realize how stupid that sounds given that I claim to love jazz music, but listen to the saxcrement on the page to understand where I, a child of the 80s, was coming from.
Wednesday, June 24 2009
Tuesday, June 23 2009
What better way to procrastinate than by plundering my iTunes library?
Here are some select data from yours truly’s music collection:
Number of Songs: 4,615
Number of Albums: 702
Most Recently Played Song: “Zat You Santa Claus” - Louis Armstrong
Most Played Song: “Suffragette City”- David Bowie
Most Played Song that maybe you haven’t heard: “A House Is Not A Motel”- Love
Most Recently Added Album: Wilco (The Album) - Wilco
First Song Alphabetically: “Abbaon Fat Track”- Tricky
Last Song Alphabetically: “Zombie Jamboree (Back to Back)”- Harry Belafonte
Longest Title: “Americans Own The Moon, They Bought It From The Germans - Who Won It At A Poker Game In World War II”- Mushroom
Smallest Number In A Song Title: “.000.000” - Beck
Largest Number In A Song Title: “Excerpt 31 69 c. 121733-122533 PM NYC” - La Monte Young
Shortest Song: “Cosmic Tomes for Sleep Walking Lovers (Pt. 4) [Fifteen Ways Towards a Finite Universe]”- Exploding Star Orchestra (0:11)
Longest Song: “Gondwana”- Miles Davis (46:05)
Shortest Song With A 5-Star Rating: “The Second Line” - Clinic (2:28) (Well, excluding Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations)
Longest Song With A 5-Star Rating: “Bitches Brew” - Miles Davis (27:01)
First Album Alphabetically: ABC Music - Radio 1 Sessions, Stereolab
Last Album Alphabetically: Young Team, Mogwai
First Album Numerically: The 3 EPs, The Beta Band
Last Album Numerically: 1968, Pajo
First Five Songs That Pop Up On Shuffle iTunes DJ:
“FDR in Trinidad”- Van Dyke Parks
“Think About Carbs”- Hot Snakes
“Juramento”- Compay Segundo
“My Favorite Things”- Alice Coltrane
“I Think I’m A Mother”- PJ Harvey
Five Songs I have Never Played
“Lieber Honig”, Neu!
“Projection Esemplastic for White Noise” - Joji Yuasa
“Pop Tones” - Public Image Ltd.
“Frankie” - Mississippi John Hurt
“Airport Jail” - Tricolor (bullshit, iTunes, I’ve totally played that)
Mozilla has made the redesign of the Firefox icon a public process, updates posted as the design evolves. If you’d think one such as myself would find this an awesome insight into the creative process of a super-talented designer (Anthony Piraino), you’d be wrong.
Brand New puts it this way:
Back in May, on the blog of Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer on Firefox, the process of redesigning the icon began, then we got a rare chance of seeing the brief for the redesign (…) And then the design process began with Iteration 1. And, lord have mercy on the designers, they posted another 13 iterations for the public to comment.
Lord have mercy on them indeed. I hope Mozilla did this just to share the process with the community, and not to gauge their approval mid-way through. I also hope they had the good sense not to present Anthony with choice posts - or worse, ask him to read through all the comments - as he worked his magic on the icon. No part of that sounds like it would improve the final product in any way. The man is already amazing at what it does - that’s why they hired him.
The following is not a perfect analogy, but here goes anyway: read this brief Wired story on the awful, awful song that was produced by public committee.
Also, as Brand New points out, this was not a radical redesign, so I’m wondering just how interesting it was to follow along anyway.
Monday, June 22 2009
Sunday, June 21 2009
“Saying eureka is an orgasm.” - Adam Zaretsky, artist, about sensuality in sciences.
And a different perspective from Isaac Asimov:
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny …”
There are few things in life my dad appears to like as much as making sausage. Here he is doing that proverbial deed; by the way, even as one who doesn’t eat pork - and it’s all pork with my dad, hold the double entendres folks - I’m here to tell you there’s nothing unsavory about this process.
Happy Father’s Day,
and also sausage.
Sunday, June 21 2009
Richard Perez re-imagines Jell-O’s visual identity. Click through for more bright colors and fun shapes.
Yo Kraft, why does Richard still list this as “student work” and not as “upcoming sweet-ass redesign”?
Sunday, June 21 2009
Saturday, June 20 2009
Just in time for today’s release of iPhone OS 3.0 with its oh-so-handy pasteboard, I’ve updated a little project of mine, Glyphboard. It’s a sort of keyboard which lets you type glyphs not available on any of the standard iPhone keyboards. These glyphs include , ☂, ☺, ✔, and even ♫.
You may find this handy for Twitter, text messaging, emails, and I’m sure I don’t know what else. A clarification: unfortunately Safari won’t let you just tap a key to copy it; you have to hold and tap. I wish you didn’t, but there.
On the flip side, even though it’s a web app, once you’ve installed Glyphboard it will work even when you’re offline. How’s that!
