Improve Your Talent for “Eyeballing It”
I’m kind of a stickler for neat and tidy layout; blame it on my printing background, I guess. I try not to be too harsh with those designers that insist on eyeballing everything. I welcomed InDesign’s Smart Guides with open arms because I could, at last, join the freewheeling eyeballing group and STILL have my tidy layout.
If you’re in the group that prefers to rely on your visual accuracy, you might want to test how fine those skills really are using the Eyeballing Game. This addictive online test quizzes you on finding the midpoint of a center, bisecting an angle, making perfect parallelograms and right angles, pinpointing the convergence of three points, and finding the exact center of a circle—something I can’t seem to master to save my life.
Each attempt is scored on accuracy and time to complete the task. The game keeps track of the best of the last 500 scores across the web and the best scores on your local machine. Interestingly, I was recently playing the Eyeballing Game with just one eye open (due to a particularly bad allergy attack) and somehow I racked up some of my best scores. I now intend to do all my freeform layout with an eye patch!