Plateworks

Plateworks in Adobe Spectrum

Direction

Shape of the page

A canvas. The proof is the page; the rail is the only thing permanently around it. Closing the comment dock hands that width straight back to the artwork.

What it leads with

Sentences. A comment opens with what somebody wrote and carries the replies under it. Selecting a comment draws its measurement on the artwork, and selecting a pin brings its comment up.

Spacing

Adobe's desktop scale, for a print operator at a large screen. The Mobile control rescales the whole interface to the touch sizes.

The one bold decision

Keyboard access designed rather than inherited. Arrow keys pan, + and − zoom, 0 fits the proof to the screen, and Escape closes the dock and puts the cursor back where it was.

The second state

Switching to mobile is a rescale of the whole interface, not a smaller copy of it: every control, every type size and every icon changes together, the way Adobe publishes them. On a narrow screen the comment dock stops taking a column and floats over the canvas instead, and the artwork recentres in what is left so nothing sits under the panel.

Where the colour comes from

Every colour on the interface is Adobe's own published Spectrum palette, taken from the system rather than sampled. The ink swatches and the proof itself are the exception, and deliberately so: those are the customer's colours, and a design system has no business reaching into somebody's artwork.

Readability, measured

• Comment text against the panel behind it: 12.44:1 dark, 13.70:1 light.
• The label on a filled accent button: 4.51:1 dark, 4.81:1 light.
• The edge of a control: 4.99:1 dark, 3.31:1 light, over the floor of 3 that an edge needs.
• A callout on the proof is held at a readable size whatever the zoom, and never renders smaller than a printed note would.
• Every status mark carries a word and a shape as well as a colour, so nothing on the page depends on being able to tell two hues apart.

Higher is easier to read. The accessibility floor is 4.5 for text and 3 for the edge of a control, and every pair here clears it in both themes.

What we changed

• The trim marks, the safety margin and a pin's measurement are drawn in the artwork's own ink rather than an interface colour, so the theme never paints over the thing being proofed.
• Adobe keeps its own typeface for its own products, so the page names it first and falls back to Source Sans 3, the open face Adobe publishes.
• Spectrum publishes no timings for its animation, so the page sets its own, inside the range Adobe documents.