Today, I was working on the social media ads for RCP and I needed to space out the numbers in "1,500,000,000". I first clicked "create outlines" so I could move the individual digits around. I knew there had to be a tool to space them automatically, but I didn't know where it was or how to use it. Following a guide I found online titled "How to Evenly Space Objects in Illustrator", I selected my objects, then clicked "Horizontal Distribute Space" in the Align window. Nothing happened. I tried again and again; Did I select the objects wrong? Eventually, on a whim, I decided to ungroup the objects. It worked perfectly. Illustrator has good tools, but it's frustrating when they're so unintuitive.
I spent a lot of time this week reading the web accessibility tutorials at MDN and trying to make my website more accessible. I changed the tags, categories, navbar, related posts, and archive to list elements, to make them better for screen readers. I also adjusted the color palette of my website to meet the WCAG AA accessibility guidelines. I'm happy I was able to come up with a color scheme that is both more accessible, and is prettier than the one I had before.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land released last friday, and it's a lot of fun so far. I love the flat color, monochromatic graphics that display during the level loading screens. I've spoken before about how I like flat colors. The definition of a "flat color" appears to be a color with no shading, texture, gradation, or halftones at all. The kind of colors I like fit the definition of flat color, but I'm okay with a bit of texture or...
Out of the new games I've played recently (which isn't that many), Donut County probably has my favorite art direction. While playing it, I realized that it has many of the design points that I mentioned liking in "Talking About My Inspirations". It uses simple shapes with flat pastel colors. The pastel very nicely communicates its status as a relaxing game. The UI uses a color that appears to be black, but is actually a dark, desaturated blue, making it...
When I saw the Image Trace feature, I thought it would be an easy way to take low resolution art and convert it into high quality, perfect SVG. Yes, it had the limitation of only tracing images in black and white, but I could simply adjust the colors to work around that, couldn't I? But I realized that converting a bitmap to an SVG still takes a lot of work. Even though Image Trace does do a huge chunk for...
