Jinjin Sun

Adobe Fresco

Fresco is a drawing app for iPad, iPhone, and Windows 10 devices. It's powerful enough for a pro illustrator while also being simple enough for a hobbyist.

a screenshot of Adobe Fresco

Working on Fresco is all about enabling users to be more expressive and efficient, while also staying out of their way on the canvas. Below are a selection of features I've worked on.

Paint Inside

"Coloring inside the lines" is an age old problem in illustration. Pros use a variety of techiques to help with this, including magic wand selections, clipping masks and locking layer transparency. However, these all still involve several steps. During a hack week, our engineer Ty Voliter created a way to do it in one click. All you had to do was turn on this "Paint Inside" behavior, and you could draw directly. In concert with features like reference layers, this became a great way to speed up coloring workflow.

I worked with Ty to come up with designs for turning this mode on, ways to notify the user about it, refinements to its behavior, and a user friendly name. You can find more info on the feature here.

a screenshot of Fresco with Paint Inside mode on, showing a vase being colored in.

Dual color outline brushes

The core of a drawing app is brushing, and we are always pushing to create exciting new ways to brush. Vector brushes that included an outline and could use two colors at once was one of those ways. I designed for browsing them, adjusting their settings, and setting their inside and outside colors.

a screenshot of Fresco with dual color outline brushes in action

Saving multicolor brushes

We had allowed for amazing brush effects through a feature called Multicolor eyedrop. These allowed you to set your brush stamp as any multicolored image via the eyedropper tool. When that multicolored stamp was applied, it created eye-popping effects like rainbows and 3d tubes. The multicolored brush stamp was saved in the document as a color swatch.

However, this feature wasn't very discoverable, and once you figured out how to make your own multicolor swatches, you couldn't save them to use in other documents.

My initial set of requirements laid out a flow for saving color swatches to a library so they could be used across documents. However, in this case you still had to choose your brush and your color swatch separately. As I iterated it became clear that saving brushes with a color swatch already attached was a more efficient way of achieving the same goal of painting with multiple colors.

a screenshot of Fresco with UI for saving a brush open

From there, we realized we could ship a default set of brushes that already had pre-set multicolor swatches applied. This made those multicolor brush effects much more discoverable and got people drawing with them faster.

a screenshot of a set of brushes with multicolor swatches applied

Public demos and articles

I've demoed Fresco publically several times throughout the years. Here are some links to quick videos that show it in action.

Here's an article about how I worked with our user research team to come up with the right focus order in Fresco for assistive tech users.

How accessibility bluelines shaped Adobe Fresco

I was also issued a patent in collaboration with Emelia Hughes and Jose Echevarria. The patent proposed a technology for allowing vision impaired users to draw on digital surfaces by providing a signal if they touched marks they'd already made with their non-drawing hand.

US Patent No. 12,014,043: Systems for Accessible Digital Painting

Process notes

As lead designer for the Drawing and Painting team, I oversaw Fresco as well as Express Draw from 2022-2023. Before becoming lead, I started as a contractor for Fresco in 2018 and from there always remained adjacent to the team through work on Adobe's other mobile apps. Throughout my time on Fresco I've worked closely with designers Matthew Carlson, Brooke Hopper, Rumiana Williams, Elissa Welsh, Vicky Vo, Megan Truong, and Dave Alonzo. We also partner closely with our PMs and engineers.

We conducted user research with our research partner Quynh Nguyen to validate and refine our designs. We also run a prerelease program and keep in touch with the illustration community via subject matter experts like Kyle Webster and power users like Chris Piascik. As an illustrator, it has also been my pleasure to personally test drive the app myself.

Of course, there are many more features in Fresco and much more depth to the ones I've touched on here. For a more behind the scenes look at this work, get in touch to schedule a chat.

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