Adobe CC Export for Screens

Much excitement over the introduction of Adobe Illustrator CC’s ‘Export for Screens’ tool, bringing a structured workflow to managing and exporting web assets.

Export for Screens

So rather than having to create individual artboards at different sizes for responsive websites, ‘Export for Screens’ acts like a mini CMS, allowing you to design once, and publish artboards to multiple iOS and Android device preset formats.

Export Assets

But wait – there’s more! Export for Screens also has an option for exporting individual graphics assets. Great for producing individual icons or other graphics without having to slice up the overall layout.

And all your saved assets can live update, so if you need to edit the base artwork, the graphics update automatically.

And of course, if you export to Creative Cloud, your assets are available for anyone else working on the project.

Now I have to admit that I’m ambivalent about Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The range of tools, features and storage that Adobe offer temp me to commit completely to their platform, and I find that uncomfortable.

However, with ‘Export for screens’, I’m almost won over.

Top tips:

• Make sure your artwork is aligned to the pixel grid. [Note to Adobe – when will you offer a ‘snap artboard to grid’ option?]
• Images cropped with a clipping path export to the size of the unclipped image & need to be re-cropped in Photoshop.

Noto

Photo: Andy Dunn

Noto, Google’s multi-language font family from Monotype is designed to work over a wide range of different languages and on any device.
 
Noto covers more than 800 languages and 100 written scripts, and includes serif and sans serif fonts across eight weights as well as numbers, emoji, symbols, and musical notation.
 
The result of a five-year collaboration between Google and Monotype, one of the main aims for the typeface is to allow cultures to communicate digitally and help enable global communications across borders, languages and cultures.
 
Monotype has researched and digitally designed the characters, writing systems and alphabets for each Noto typeface, applying the rules and idiosyncrasies for individual languages to the fonts, based on the Unicode standard – a character coding system that defines the characters and languages that can be displayed and used within a computer system.
 
Because new scripts are constantly being added to Unicode, when a computer is unable to display a character in a font, it displays blank boxes instead. These are colloquially known as “tofu”. The name Noto is taken from Google’s goal of having “no more tofu”.

Monotype linguistic typographer Kamal Mansour says: “The aim of the Noto project is to provide digital representation to all the scripts in the Unicode Standard. That in particular is something that many different language communities could not afford to do on their own.”