Amar Sagoo

4 September 2014

Now tweeting

I have a very high threshold for joining social networks, but I recently overcame this in a rare instance and finally started posting on Twitter. If you don't use an RSS reader, this may be the best way to find out when I publish new articles. I also share briefer thoughts there which I wouldn't put on this blog (this post is already exceptionally short).

Here I am: @amar_designer

22 January 2014

Demystifying colour management

Colour management is a pretty arcane subject to most people, even if it’s relevant to their work. I recently spent some time trying to understand it, and encountered two challenges. First, I didn’t find any really clear explanation of the concepts involved. Some are thorough but difficult to follow. Others give practical advice without elucidating the fundamentals. The second problem is that there’s conflicting advice about best practices when designing for the web.

I’d like to take on the challenge of addressing both of these issues. I will first explain some of the basic concepts behind colour management, using illustrations that hopefully make it easier to understand. I will then talk about practical implications for web-oriented design.

How it works

Colours can be described in different ways, for example as a mix of red, green and blue light, or in terms of their hue, saturation and lightness. In each of these colour models, you can think of the dimensions as forming a "space". One such colour space is called CIE xyY, and I’ll use it for my illustrations here. It contains all the colours visible to the average human eye, and has the convenient property that, although it’s three-dimensional, you can look at it "from above" and get a nice, two-dimensional map of chromaticities at maximum brightness:

CIE xyY chromaticity diagram

When you’re working on a particular display, it’ll only be able to show a subset of all visible colours. This range is called its gamut and will have a triangular footprint in the CIE xyY space (as will any other RGB space):

Display space within the xyY space

If a colour profile describes a sub-space like this which exactly corresponds to the range of colours your display can actually show, it’s said to be perfectly calibrated.

11 January 2014

5 years later…

UPDATE – 1 July 2023: Tofu is still alive, with version 3.0 now available, and Licensed got an update too.

Wow, that was longer between posts than I had intended.

Seriously, though, I'm sorry for the long silence, and for the lack of updates to my software. I'm going to tell you a bit about what's happening with my apps, my life and this blog.

So what’s been going on?

After many years of working mainly as a software engineer with a passion for design, I managed to fulfil my dream of becoming a full-time interaction designer in 2011 by joining Google. I moved from London to Switzerland to join their office in Zurich, where I live today.

Previously, my creative energy needed an outlet outside my job, which my free Mac and iOS apps provided. Since becoming a full-time designer, I feel that much less of my capacity has been available to put into extra-curricular projects.

Let me tell you my plan for each of my apps. There is a general theme of retirement, but I think these are the right decisions to make, and, as I explain at the end, I intend to direct my energy into efforts that I hope will be of more benefit.