Reset

Sometimes the right move is to start again. The Reset menu starts one half of the work again and leaves the other half alone: the design, with your colors kept, or the colors, with your design kept. Both can be undone.

What it does

The ‘Reset’ button in the title bar opens a small menu with two rows. As the menu opens, each row says what it will clear and what it will keep.

• Design clears every cut and the piece it sent to the back, any shapes still waiting for a flip direction, and the selection. It keeps the palette and the size of the sheet. Its note counts what is there, for example ‘3 cuts · colors kept’, or reads ‘Nothing on the sheet · colors kept’ when there is nothing to clear. Afterwards the view glides back to the sheet and goes on framing the design by itself, as it does when the app opens.
• Colors puts the three colors back to the starting palette: ‘Back to the starting palette · design kept’. It releases an armed harmony, opens every Lock so that nothing is locked, as when the app starts, and returns the pigment mixer’s recipes to the ones the starting colors are mixed from. Every shape stays as it is.

Neither asks for confirmation. Each is one undo step, so ⌘Z brings the work straight back. A short message says what happened, ‘Design reset. The palette is untouched.’ or ‘Palette reset. The design is untouched.’, and if there was nothing to clear, the message is ‘The sheet was already empty.’ and no step is recorded. Escape closes the menu without doing anything.

Why it works this way

There are two resets because the two halves of the work are decided separately. A palette is often settled long before the arrangement of cuts, or the other way around, and a single ‘start over’ would throw away the half you wanted to keep. Each reset touches only its own half.

There is no confirmation because the undo is the confirmation. A dialog on an action you have just asked for is a small tax on every time you meant it; an undo step costs nothing until the one time you need it. For the same reason a reset never clears the undo history: that would remove the only way back from a reset that was a mistake.

The sheet keeps its size because the size is set-up, like the palette. If you have cut your stock to a particular size, starting the design again should not change the paper. The harmony lock goes with the color reset because a lock armed on the old palette would work the other two colors out again from it on your next change, and the reset would seem not to have happened. The padlocks open because the starting palette is the one the app opens on, with nothing locked.

It is one button with two rows rather than two buttons because the title bar is the busiest strip in the app, a phone has no room for two more icons, and each row needs space to say what it clears and what it keeps.

The metaphor

The metaphor is the fresh sheet. Clear the table, take a new sheet from the pile, keep your paints; or keep the drawing and mix new paints. Latin has a name for the idea, tabula rasa, the scraped tablet. Roman writers wrote with a stylus on wooden tablets filled with wax, and the flat end of the stylus smoothed the wax for the next text. Our ‘clean slate’ is the same thought.

Where it holds: the other half of the work is exactly as you left it. Where it breaks: in the studio the old sheet still exists after you take a new one, and you can pin it on the wall. Here the old design lives on only in the undo history, until you reload, and in any project file you saved. And a tabula rasa takes everything; these resets take only half.

A history

In art

Erasure became a work of art in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, spent more than a month rubbing it out with a variety of erasers, and showed what was left. Jasper Johns lettered its label, Erased de Kooning Drawing, and it now belongs to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Starting over has a humbler history too: painters short of money scraped or painted over their canvases, and X-rays of Picasso’s early paintings have found other pictures underneath.

Keeping the design while changing the colors is just as old. A Japanese color woodblock print is made from a key block, which carries the lines, and a set of color blocks; the printer inks each block separately. The same blocks could be printed again with different colors, and later printings of famous designs can differ in color from the first. That is a color reset with the design kept.

In printing

A letterpress printer’s reset was called distribution. When a job was done, the forme was unlocked and every piece of type went back, letter by letter, to its compartment in the case, ready to be set into something new, while the press, the ink and the paper stayed as they were. The lithographer’s reset is more literal still. Lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in Bavaria in 1796, prints from a drawing made on a slab of fine limestone. When a job is finished the stone is ground with grit and water until the old image is gone, and the next drawing goes onto the same stone, which can serve for many years.

In technology

Computers took the word from electronics, where a reset returns a circuit to a known starting state. The toy version reached America in 1960, when the Ohio Art Company began selling André Cassagnes’s Etch A Sketch: turn it upside down and shake it, and aluminum powder coats the inside of the glass again, erasing the drawing and keeping the toy. Software split ‘start again’ into many commands: New for a fresh document, Revert for the last saved version, and in design tools, separate resets for separate things. The web made the split structural in 1996, when CSS let a page’s content and its styling be kept and changed apart. This strand of the history is thin; the idea underneath it, form in one place and color in another, each able to start again without the other, is the same one the woodblock printer used.

In professional software

Professional programs rarely have one reset button. They divide starting again into separate commands, each with its own reach: back to the last save, back to a tool’s defaults, back to the default colors, back to a tidy workspace. The habit that transfers is the one the Reset menu teaches: know what a reset clears and what it keeps before you choose it.

• Adobe Photoshop. ‘File › Revert’ returns the image to its last saved state and, like the resets here, is recorded as a step you can undo. Press D for the default colors, black and white, and X to swap them. Right-click the tool icon at the left of the options bar to choose ‘Reset Tool’ or ‘Reset All Tools’.
• Adobe Illustrator. ‘File › Revert’ goes back to the last saved version, and D restores the default fill and stroke, white and black. In Illustrator and Photoshop alike, the ‘Window › Workspace’ menu can reset the current workspace, putting its panels back as they were first laid out.
• Adobe Lightroom Classic. In the Develop module, the ‘Reset’ button below the right-hand panels, or Shift-⌘R (Ctrl+Shift+R), clears every adjustment and leaves the photo itself untouched. Double-click a slider’s name to reset that one alone. It is ‘Reset’ → ‘Colors’ in spirit: the picture stays and its treatment starts again.
• Autodesk AutoCAD. The ‘Reset’ button on the Profiles tab of the OPTIONS dialog returns the current profile’s settings to their defaults. It resets the program, not the drawing, and discards your customization, so use it only when you are sure.

What carries over. Before any reset, find out which part of the work it takes and whether Undo can bring it back. A revert in Photoshop and a Develop reset in Lightroom can both be undone; a reset of a program’s own settings usually cannot, so note or export your settings before you use one.

Try this

• Make a design you like, choose ‘Reset’ → ‘Colors’, then Undo.
• Choose ‘Reset’ → ‘Design’, then Undo straight away.
• Open the Reset menu on an empty sheet and read what the Design row says.

Going further

Read on with Undo and redo, Colors and File.

• Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
• Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things