Design with Sketch
As little design as possible
It’s been one year since I first wrote about Sketch. Since then, Sketch released Mirror, Background Blur, and made many improvements for Artboards, SVG support and speed. All of these considerably allowing us designers to adapt to the future of design — a world with as little design as possible, and where user interface design is at the forefront. It makes us focus on responsive design rather than photo editing. Interactions and animations instead of faux textures. Sketch is the tool that makes our workflow 10x faster so that we can move on to other aspects of design.
Artboards
Over the year, I fine-tuned my design process. Now, I design straight for Mobile, then work my way up to Web. I have found that using Artboards was the most efficient way to create a responsive design.
Sketch Mirror
Mirror works beautifully with Artboards. You can quickly view your design from your iPhone and swipe between artboards.
Vectors and SVG
I can’t tell you enough how crucial it is to work with vectors. As visual designers, we shouldn’t be happy with just using PixelLove and Streamline out of the box. We gotta customise them! Give them love. Add colors and re-shape them for the context that you design in.
SVGs are growing in popularity for good reason. You can colour them, animate them and they’ll look sharp on any device. We’re finally starting to understand them.
Background Blur
This may seem insignificant, but it’s not. When you’re designing for iOS 7, you don’t want to manually blur things. Blur is an essential method for designing with depth and context while keeping all the natural colors. Just using a 80% black layer (to make the text readable) will completely dim the colors. Instead, you can dim less and use Blur.
iCloud Support
I’m a visual person. I love to organize my designs in a very visual way. That’s why I stopped using Dropbox to browse and started using Mavericks’ tags.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Since we spend an obsessive amount of hours designing in Sketch, we gotta work more efficiently with Keyboard shortcuts. Here’s a great list: http://sketchshortcuts.com
A Growing Community
Sketch is powerful out of the box. But like any small team, they have to prioritize on certain features. That’s where the community comes in.
Sketch Generator — Just like Photoshop’s Generator or Slicy, this neat plugin allows Sketch users to export assets merely by naming its layers.
Symbols — Love to re-use elements in your design? This plugin is for you
Here’s a full list of all the plugins available.
Fantastic Resources
One of the early complaints about Sketch was the lack of downloadable resources. Well, no more.
Teehan+Lax released a very complete iOS 7 Sketch template.
I also use Tap+Apps iOS7 Template because they have other UI elements and the Keyboards broken down into layers.
For more Sketch templates, go to Sketchmine.co, SketchAppSources, Sketch’s Website
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