Design Weekly #25
Weekly design news and inspiration
Welcome to Design Weekly 25, a quick rundown of the most interesting products, articles and other cool design-related things from throughout the week 😀.
After a few weeks of being MIA, we are back for good (like the Take That song but better).
Design News
Adobe XD Goes Free & June Update
The common perception of Adobe is they make fantastic software, often the industry leaders in many categories, but their subscription pricing model is expensive and doesn’t suit everyone. Now they’ve made a bit of a u-turn by releasing a completely free tier for XD (que excited screaming).
The free version includes all the features subscribers get and is limited only by its collaboration capabilities. In other words it offers everything required to create awesome UI designs and prototypes.
This is great news for students, those just getting started with design and freelancers. Or those designers out there who are trying to save some cash.
Where Adobe really go beyond most other companies is their extensive learning resources. Designers using XD can find loads of useful information to help improve their craft. Beginners can find tutorials on getting started via the main site. Adobe’s YouTube channel provides a host of extensive livestreams and videos dedicated to XD’s features, these feature different designers as they show step by step how they create a project, usually split across three 2 hour streams. improving your UI/UX workflow and general advice from top creatives in the industry.
Xd’s June update brings fixed elements, overlay support, improved cropping, private sharing and other performance tweaks, it’s available now.
Sketch 50
The next major update to Sketch has been out for a while now and it’s probably not what you were expecting. Sketch 50 focuses more on general performance tweaks and improvements rather than headline grabbing features.
These improvements include fixes to import and exporting, nested symbol overides, scaling images to artboards and loads more as well as a lot of bug fixes. With 50.1 and 50.2 addressing even more bug fixes.
Sketch 51 is currently in beta and new features include library styles, fixed elements and significantly improved appearance of arrows. Not 100% sold on that last one, although the others are both welcome changes. We expect the public release of Sketch 51 will be available around mid-July but please don’t quote us on that (our crystal ball has been playing up recently).
The New Youtube Music
The revamped YouTube Music serves as Google’s latest answer to Spotify (whose UI it heavily borrows from) on desktop and mobile apps. The service replaces Google Play Music and is free with ads. YouTube Premium members get ad-free listening as part of their subscription package.
So far YouTube Music doesn’t seem to offer any content you can’t access on regular YouTube, although we’d expect exclusive content in the coming months.
Cool Work From Behance
Art Styles From New Video Games
Hollow Knight (June 12th)
Shameless Self Promotion
Recently I teamed up with my mate, front-end web developer Declan Kay on a cool project he had in mind to coincide with the World Cup. The World Cup Nations Guide is full of bite-sized facts and information on the European teams in the competition as well as the countries themselves.
The interface is a map of Europe with location placeholders for the countries who qualified for the world cup. Clicking on an icon brings up a modal where the user can switch between profiles for the country and team.
The country pages include facts like population, size, capital city, major language as well as information on the culture, things to do there and a call to action for the official tourism board.
The team pages include facts like key player, world ranking, World Cup previous best, as well as information on how they qualified, who’s in the current squad and how they performed throughout the history of the competition. It includes a call to action to visit the official football association of the nation.
The project was just for fun and is completely nonprofit. Hopefully a few people out there like the idea, enjoy the content and maybe learn something new along the way. Check it out here.
This Week’s Best Reads From Around the Web
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