Wednesday October 3, 2007
Smart Palettes in Omnigraffle
One nice little feature about Omnigraffle is how the toolbar allows you to save commonly used shapes and styles. What’s particularly nice is how the feature is integrated into the design of the toolbar. Not only does it make the toolbar that much more powerful, but it does it in an entirely unobtrusive way.
The toolbar icons change to represent the currently selected style. Along with a small arrow, the visual affordances help expose a feature that, while useful, might easily be overlooked. It’s not incredibly intuitive to actually manage the styles, but those issues could easily be resolved with some improvements to the style management labels and interactions.
It’s a tiny detail, but it’s an excellent example of some of the reasons that I love Omnigraffle. It has some imperfections, as any piece of software does, but overall, it handles things intuitively and elegantly.
EMC helps organizations create superior IT environments, from infrastructure solutions all the way up to software development and user experience design.
Learn more…About This 404er
Garrett Dimon
Garrett truly enjoys sharing his ideas about making the web a better place for humans. Whether it's improving markup or CSS, or using Design to create more usable experiences, or just sharing ideas and opinions on interfaces, he's genuinely excited about the day that people aren't intimidated or held hostage by technology. Currently, he's at Next Update, hard at work on a not-so-secret project, Sifter.
- Recent entries by Garrett:
- Smart Palettes in Omnigraffle
- Easy to Use
- Thinking and Leaping
- Balancing Design, Technology, and Business