Blog
Notes on screenshots, visual communication, and documenting software so other people can follow it.
Write a screenshot style guide before you need one
Six decisions, made once, that stop your product's images looking like they came from six different companies. Most teams never make them.
Screenshots in pull requests: what reviewers actually need
A diff shows what changed in the code. A screenshot shows what changed for the user. Most PR screenshots show neither clearly.
Screenshots for people who are asleep
When your reader replies eight hours later, every ambiguity in a screenshot costs a full day. Async work changes what a good screenshot has to contain.
How to screenshot a menu that closes when you try
Dropdowns, tooltips, and context menus dismiss the moment you press a shortcut. Three reliable ways to capture them anyway.
GIF or video: which to use when showing something moving
GIFs autoplay everywhere and compress terribly. Video compresses well and sometimes refuses to play. The choice is really about where it's going.
Screenshots in documentation age badly. Here's how to slow it down.
Every screenshot in your docs is a maintenance liability with a shelf life. A few capture decisions make the difference between updating twelve images and updating two.
How to capture a full webpage, and why the result is often wrong
Every browser can screenshot a whole page. Lazy loading, sticky headers, and viewport-height units are why the output frequently doesn't match what you saw.
PNG, JPEG, or WebP: which format for screenshots
Screenshots are mostly flat colour and sharp text, which is the exact case JPEG handles worst. Here's what to use instead and when it matters.
Why your screenshots look blurry (and how pixel density causes it)
Blurry screenshots are almost never a capture problem. They're a scaling problem, and there are four distinct ways to cause one.
Windows screenshot shortcuts, and which key actually saves a file
Print Screen, Win+Shift+S, Alt+PrtScn and Win+PrtScn all do different things. Only one of them saves a file, and it isn't the obvious one.
Every macOS screenshot shortcut worth memorising
The four shortcuts, the modifier keys that change what they do, and the in-flight adjustments most people never discover.
The screenshot that makes a bug report actionable
Most bug report screenshots show the symptom and nothing else. Four extra seconds of framing turns a screenshot into evidence a developer can work from.
How to redact a screenshot so the data is actually gone
Blur and pixelation look like redaction but are reversible transformations. If something must stay secret, cover it with solid pixels and re-export.
Crop before you annotate, not after
Arrows compete for attention. Cropping removes the competition. Most screenshots are improved more by what you take out than by what you draw on.
Why most screenshots fail to communicate
A screenshot is a claim about what matters on a screen. Most of them forget to make that claim, and the reader has to guess.