3 ms·
Good article in general but mixed with many fallacies. 1. Size is obviously not height. It's the area of the shape. There are complications though, e.g. negati
by vladdanilov 9y ago
Good article in general but mixed with many fallacies.
1. Size is obviously not height. It's the area of the shape. There are complications though, e.g. negative space often adds weight. Blurring shapes is a terrible idea here.
2. Aligning shape edges is also an optimization problem to equalize overshooting areas.
3. Finding a visual center has nothing to do with the circumcircle in a general case. It's a well-known centroid. But, again, there are lots of complications.
4. A circle is perfectly circular. There are other reasons for the "O" adjustments in typography. It's even mentioned later on with no connection to here.
5. The round corners is another story. In this case G2 fillets are most pleasing. It's hard to make this adjustment by hand, that is why the examples look bad and unnatural. Squircle, Lamé curve, has nothing to do with the iOS icon shape.
Most of these adjustments can be done with mathematical precision. The rest can be approximated well enough with mathematical models. Ideally, design tools should guide these adjustments. There is definitely interest. My most successful plugin for Sketch happened to be the one for optical adjustments http://designplugins.com/optically http://designplugins.com/optically.
- vog 9y agoIndeed, all those obvious misconceptions make the title addition "(for True Nerds)" sound quite strange. Sitting in front of your computer all day doesn't make you a nerd. Diving into a topic and not stopping until you develop a shockingly deep unterstanding, that does make you a nerd. (Bonus points for surpassing the generally-accepted experts on that field.)
- ncr100 9y agoRe 3. the centroid seems wrong in the article (the one on the right is supposedly 'good') https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*3VebDJ3XSt3g3syHYru3FQ.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*3VebDJ3XSt3g3syHY... . Both look uncomfortably off-center, too far to the left or right. There must be a better way than 'draw a circle around it' (imagine with Portlandia voice.)
- muglug 9y agoYeah, having spent a bit of time in Photoshop, for that particular problem I think the solution is an average of shape centre-of-mass and bounding rectangle centre.