Thursday 23 October 2014

Color Workflow and Palette



Hello, this is Peter Duong the author of DrawExpress.  One user had reminded me that I haven’t updated this blog for a while.  At that time, I was updating features here and there.  However I felt that I wasn’t working on anything exciting to talk about.   You can follow my changes log to get an idea of what have been done since.  Anyways, the “Features and Roadmap” page is turning out to be close to the changes log.  Now, I think it is better to discuss about some of the major pain points and design decisions instead. 

So looking back at all the features added recently, I feel that some of them aren’t solved properly yet.  Although, it provides the added functionality, however it is still lacking in the user experience aspect of DrawExpress.   So I decided to take a step back to look at them and come up with better a solution before moving forward. So for the next few blogs I am opened to discussion and hopefully getting some insights from you.

Here is a list of things that I have in minds:

  • Color workflow
  • Line and curve
  • Custom Library
  •  Project and file organization
  • File sharing and synchronization

For this post I am going to discuss about the color workflow.  Right now the coloring workflow is a bit confusing between the gesture and the style menu.   For those wanting a better visual diagram this is an area that will need improvement both in the UX and the coloring options.  I am still in favor of leaving in the gesture option but it will need to support the ability to change text and stroke.  Right now you can use gestures for fill and the menu for text and stroke.   

Also, the color palette and theme is really rigid and will need to be customizable.  I do not think it is necessary to create an open ended color mixture every time you want to change the color.   However, an ability to replace some of the default colors on the bar with your own favorite would be better.  I must admit that the default colors set aren’t well thought out.

Please feel free to leave your feedback regarding to this topic here or email me at support@drawexpress.com.   I’ll be updating this blog with more implementation details later.

Regards,
PD