On October 9th, 2018 my wife, Tara, and I had to make the hardest decision any dog parent ever has to make. We had to help our beloved dog, Sammy, leave this life at only age 5–1/2 years. I know the pain I feel now will probably never go away…

NB: I am re-publishing this article I wrote a while back after a series of conversations about the responsibilities of the artist/designer and the boundaries of art. One of my favorite forms of art is street art or graffiti. I won’t bother trying to deny that graffiti is vandalism. It…

There’s a plugin for that … Most discussions about Adobe Illustrator tend to focus solely on the off-the-shelf product and its core capabilities. And to be sure, Illustrator is powerful out of the box. But sometimes the native features do not quite do what you need or not quite in the way you need it. There…

Live by the Tag, Die by the Tag You have created a masterpiece of icon design. You are ready to release your creation to the icon-buying market. It is time to add some high-quality tags so customers can find them. …

In this post we will review Vectr, a free, web-based vector drawing application. Designers tend to have very strong feelings about their tools. Ask any icon designer or illustrator which vector authoring app they prefer and you will probably get a very passionate reply, not just about the product but also about its makers. This passionate view of one’s tools, however, can occasionally cause us to miss a great opportunity to make our lives easier or to miss a diamond-in-the-rough whose future we have an opportunity to help shape. We believe Vectr offers users one such opportunity.

We have spent the past 5 weeks reviewing Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and Sketch for icon designers. We compared identical tasks in each application and our reviewers offered their individual opinions based on creating a series of icons with each tool. — From the beginning of this series, however, we have maintained that our objective is not to tell readers which is the best application for the job — in our case icon design — nor tell readers which application they should use. We are purveyors of information that we hope is…

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas…” — Steve Jobs — Sketch does not try to be all things to all users. Whereas Adobe Illustrator tries to provide a tool for every conceivable vector authoring need, the Sketch Team chose to focus on doing one thing and doing it very well. That one thing, of course, is UI/UX design.

Elon Musk, in an interview on Foundation, has been quoted as saying “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”

It is difficult to write a review of software one has been using for over 20 years. As the most popular vector illustration program, Illustrator is second nature to most illustrators and icon designers. Most product reviews are done by analogy rather than by first principles but in order to do a meaningful review, one must step back from the way one performs a certain task or set of tasks in the software and to examine how one would intuitively perform the same tasks if the tools were not predefined for us.