How Sketch app Helps Design Culture
As a big part of our design workflow
Not long ago I was reading an article on how to have a healthy design culture, and I decided to write on the same topic from a different point of view for mobile application design workflow. Culture is one of the more fundamental elements to building productive and efficient teams.
But why is that? I see team culture as daily rituals that team members undertake to help their team grow in the right way; exactly the same way culture helps bigger societies.
The culture of a team isn’t something that can be copied or cloned, but rather it needs to be defined based on unique goals, products, and resources of each team, and the communication protocols between their members. BUT, the baby steps are always the same.
I noticed that there are a bunch of great exercises for development teams, and development flows out there; but unfortunately there are not enough available for design teams, so you have to go back and forth to find the right path through many available options.
I believe culture is something like a standard workflow, it provides clear-cut and obvious standards for a team, and everyone in the team can make clearer and faster decisions.
Sketch app and it’s fantastic plugins help the designers community to simplify their workflows and shape their culture.
Hereunder I share my experience on defining design culture for my design team as a checklist of necessary steps in our workflow. It may help you define yours faster.
Modular Design
• Symbols
When it comes to modularity, everything gets better, simpler, and more efficient. Modularity in design is a concept implemented as Symbols in Sketch. Symbols helps you keep your design elements as modules and use them wherever you want. By changing one property in a Symbol, all other related instances will be affected immediately. Imagine you have designed a TabBar navigation and each tab has its own style when it’s active. By defining the TabBar as a Symbol you can use it in all your pages in a matter of seconds, and change all its instances in a glimpse.
• Shared Styles
Shared Styles is Sketch’s solution for text style modularity. You can define Shared Styles for page titles, paragraph headings, regular and other text styles and apply them to your designs. Like every other modular solution, by changing one, you apply the change on other intakes with a single click.
Well-Documented Design
• Artboards and Pages
I hadn’t seen the concept of Artboards and Pages in any other application for design, before Sketch, these concepts are absolute game changers. It is such a good feature that Adobe’s new design tool, Adobe Xd, has borrowed it from Sketch. These features help designers organize their designs. For example, you can organize the tabs of your application as Pages, and organize different states, and the flow as Artboards.
• Rename It plugin
When you’re in a rush to finish your designs, you usually end up with messy names for layers and groups. If you’re working as a team, someone else might continue your work, and they will need to spend a lot of time figuring out your layers. So it’s necessary for a design team to have a naming format for their layers and the Rename It plugin helps you rename your layers like a boss!
• Palette
Preparing the color palette is one of the initial steps of design. Sketch has two different color palettes, the first one is “Global Palette” and the second is “Document Palette”. You can save colors in the Global palette to use in all your documents, and in the Document palette to use in your current design document. Also Sketch Palettes is a great plugin that empowers you to generate and manage color palettes. Also Craft plugin can generates these palettes for you. Keep reading, we’ll get to know Craft at the below.
• Notebook plugin
As a product designer, writing function specification and other documentation steps of design are a vital part of my job. We can discuss the importance of design documentations from two different angles. One, handing over the designs to developers; and two, when you want to continue improving your designs months later you can get onboard in a few minutes by reviewing the documentations. The Notebook plugin for Sketch simplifies several documentation steps of your design flow.
• Measure plugin
Measuring the design and delivering it to the developers is a necessary but boring part of a team’s design process. Boring steps in your workflow, make you less productive. The Measure plugin has made the designers’ life a lot easier. This plugin helps you document your designs and let developers understand your design not visually, but in measurements and properties language. You can read more about Measure here.
Agile Workflow
• Export Options
Speed plays an important role in the app production race these days, and exporting assets to implement design is a time consuming step in the design flow. Sketch has the most advanced and yet simple export tool that makes this step a lot faster. You can add suffixes and prefixes to the name of the assets you want to export, and enjoy the automation. Also there’s a bunch of plugins you can install on your software to make the flow even more customizable.
• Craft plugin
Filling designs with dummy data is another time consuming step of design which the Craft plugin helps you with this step. You can also use many different features to sync your designs on your InVision account. Craft is getting updates with other great features that you can check out here.
What do you think?
The issues mentioned above are what I think are the best features of Sketch which could contribute to the design flow. If you’re new to Sketch or are already using it, please leave comments and let me know what you think about Sketch and the whole Design Culture topic.
