Following my previous article on working with ARKit and SceneKit, we at Black Pixel have had the opportunity to dig into some of the less defined features of the SceneKit editor. If you’re working with 3D in iOS, these tips may save you from a headache or two. Positioning There is…

Incorporating Pixelboard’s shape recognition tool into the UI. — For the newest update to Pixelboard, we wanted to make it easier to draw basic shapes like rectangles, ellipses, and straight lines. We accomplished this through a regimen of machine learning, with the team training Pixelboard to reliably recognize those inputs. It’s possible to use this feature — called Smart…

ARKit is the hot new technology in iOS 11 that lets you view and interact with virtual objects in real space. It’s not hard to get an ARKit project up and running, but getting your 3D art into it can present some challenges. Fortunately, once your art is imported, you…

Basic guidelines for clean, consistent development. — For the sake of our own Framer module development, we authored this style guide as a reference for ourselves. We offer it here as a talking point for the Framer community at large. Most of these guidelines may seem like common sense, though it’s helpful to have them in writing…

How to animate a layer along a motion path. — Framer makes it easy to animate many aspects of a layer, but from time to time you may want to reach beyond the default animatable properties and do something the designers didn’t account for. It’s possible to roll your own animations, with your own animation curves. …

Using key-value objects to make multi-device prototypes. — If you work long enough with Framer prototypes, eventually you’ll encounter the problem of how to adapt a prototype’s layout to handle multiple devices and orientations. Rather than create a separate prototype for every situation — say, one for iPhone in portrait orientation and one for iPad in landscape —…

Framer Studio is an excellent prototyping tool for designers. Not only does it enable sophisticated prototypes out of the box, but its capabilities can be extended via modules. You’ll find plenty of great modules around the web, but what if you want to build your own? Unfortunately, there’s a large…

In 2012, a design agency known as Softfacade posted a case study to the Web. Softfacade’s task was to redesign a logo mascot icon originally conceived by Russian studio Turbomilk. At the time of the case study, Softfacade was based entirely in St. …

The 50% Gray — The question of whether designers should learn to code has sparked a great deal of discussion and furcated into areas that can sometimes seem beside the main point. I myself am a designer who has come to rely on code and who enjoys learning more about it. However, I don’t…