Designing with the latest Craft plugin
What are the two things designers value in their workflows?
☝️Speed and ✌️Data
Thanks to the plugin suite, Craft by InVision allows us to easily and efficiently add content. The free plugin provides a must-have set of design tools that integrates directly into Photoshop and Sketch. If you are already using Craft, you’ve probably noticed the significant improvements in the interface, as well as increased alignment, productivity and transparency for team members.
Craft is easily the greatest combo of intuitive user interface and powerful product design. Here are some of my favorite features:
1. Data
Give me a hell yeah if you prefer real and relevant data for your designs over lorem ipsum. 🙋
The type, photos, JSON, and web plugins have now been consolidated within Data, which simplifies the menu. Grabbing images and text from live sites has never been this easy, and now you’ll find all of the images, text, and data you need in one organized location. Just click on a photo or text to fill with an image. When you duplicate this content, Data will let you pull more from the same webpage. Pretty cool, if you ask me. (see it in action here)
2. Library
This one is a real time saver. The Library plugin lets you generate a custom style guide inside of Sketch. Your custom design assets including color palette, fonts, and text styles can be shared via Dropbox. Library allows you to sync and share any layer, group, or artboard within Sketch to your team, helping keep your library of assets and UI kit synced together. If any updates are made, Craft will ping you to sync when new updates to your assets are available. From there, just drag and drop your assets into the designs, to ensure consistency throughout your project. Who doesn’t love that?
Library is a must-have for every designer’s toolbox.
3. Sync
Although this one is still in beta, Craft Sync is a team favorite. Sync helped us solve an important problem when sharing our prototypes with clients. Our team used Dropbox sync, a feature that updates an InVision prototype when the Sketch file is saved. We had less control when the prototype synced, thereby giving more room for clients to see a half-broken interface.
We couldn’t contain our excitement when we started using Sync. It accelerates the design-to-prototype workflow and makes syncing Sketch artboards to InVision faster than ever without having to leave your native design environment. Whether you’re syncing individual artboards or entire pages, with a click and a sync, you’ve seamlessly and confidently synced your design files for real-time sharing with your team/clients.
4. Freehand
This one is great if you are looking to get fast feedback. You’ve got an idea and you want pass it by the designers and product managers. There’s definitely no time to worry about perfect pixels, putting together a beautiful presentation, or exact colors. You just need to get some feedback on a work in progress. Freehand lets your team draw and collaborate in real-time to get the feedback you need, when you need it.
The Future of Prototyping
So there you have it. Craft is by far the easiest and most powerful way to create a prototype. Some of the features are still in beta, which leads me to believe that it will only continue to get better.
Imagine how impressive the design environments will be as prototyping continues to scale to a wider variety of platforms to meet our designer needs. When that happens, we’ll be so close to fully functioning products without ever having to write a single line of code! (Hi developers, we still love you ❤️)
The dream is getting closer and closer with every update, and there’s no doubt InVision and Sketch are leading the way.
Want More?
For more in-depth information on everything you can do with the unreleased Prototype plugin (now in limited beta), check out this article from InVision below.
+More on the Craft plugin here.
Thanks for reading! Reach out to me if you have questions or want to geek out 😍 over the plugin with me.
Go Nimbly is the premier marketing and sales consultancy for SaaS companies. Founded and headquartered in San Francisco, Go Nimbly provides customers with a customized team to manage everything from strategy to execution for their marketing and sales systems. To learn more, visit gonimbly.com.
