Although I have a good bit of tech and product knowledge I’m very much the a hobby/amateur in actually doing any web design.
Today using it to build a site for a friend and just got hit by the bug of cmd + Z to undo a few things causing an instant crash that lost an hour’s worth of work. So a bit frustrated.
In actually using RW a bit more than I normally do a few questions arose.
Colours - using the Mac colour picker is a miserable experience, especially having defined colour palette for different projects. Any suggestions for a better colour picker? Using High Sierra (old MacBook and no upgrade is going to be on the horizon) so might not be able to run the latest and greatest.
Also on colours, I wish there was a better/easier way to apply colours to many stacks at the same time. It gets infuriating to have to individually set colours in each stack from different devs.
Could there be some sort of setting applied by devs to allow colours to be set by a framework? Probably a lot of work/immpossible for the benefit I know but it also pops up in page speed, different stacks having their own css file to upload rather than just one main file.
Saving - do folk just get in to a rhythm of saving often or is there a lazy automated way to do it?
First off, before you even start to open RW, have a sketch of what you want for each page. Nothing fancy, back of a napkin sketch will do. This will go a long way to keeping you on track (at least for me it does)
Save often: Command S is your friend get used to it so you don’t have the issue of losing hours of work.
While you are on an older system, nothing wrong with the color picker especially if you use the eye dropper and save the color in the color well. I do this on all of my projects.
For colors on different stacks, I use Foundation and have the colors in a swatch that I can apply wherever I want, it propagates to any item that shares that swatch so if I need to change a color I just change it one time in the swatch and all instances change.
I try to sketch stuff out beforehand but always tricky between what I have in my head and getting it on to a page lol.
As much as I often save in many other programs in RW I’m often changing round and don’t necessarily want to overwrite previous layouts as I may go back and forth.
A tricky one, cloning projects pages may be a way to overcome RW’s undo bug.
Colours is perhaps not well explained. The built in system one for selecting colours in RW is annoying. The amount of times I’ve clicked on a colour to change and the selection to enter a hex code is buried, having to reselect RGB, then enter the hex etc.
I know you can add frequently used colours to it at the bottom but it would be good to have one which allowed you to switch between different sets of palettes easily. I used to have Skala colour but it stopped working well and it was warned against using due to a corruption issue with RW files.
So hopefully find something that fits the bill.
I do have F6 and have started using it a little bit but even it has its limits when working with other dev’s stacks.
If your dealing with a large corporate account I always start with the branding guidelines from their marketing Dept. Believe me it will save you a lot of headaches. I do systems for very large corporations you don’t want to go off on a tangent.
Most of theses companies will have a Corp branded Powerpoint theme as well as specific details from colour to official fonts.
I won’t even start a project unless I have this these days. I have wasted too much time the past on this bouncing from dept to dept on who feels the colour or the font is not what a particular individual wants.
