No matter whether you are designing a whole design system or just a couple of screens, symbols in Sketch will help you keep your file organized and will save you a lot of time in the long run.
In this article, I’ll share with you a few best practices and tricks to help you unleash symbols’ full potential.
Read more…
The past year has seen quite a rise in UI design tools. While existing applications, such as Affinity Designer, Gravit and Sketch, have improved drastically, some new players have entered the field, such as Adobe XD (short for Adobe Experience Design) and Figma.
For me, the latter is the most remarkable. Due to its similarity to Sketch, Figma was easy for me to grasp right from the start, but it also has some unique features to differentiate it from its competitor, such as easy file-sharing, vector networks, “constraints” (for responsive design) and real-time collaboration.
Read more…
The easiest way to work with real data in Sketch is the with Craft plugin from InVision. It provides a wealth of predefined content, such as names, dates, and addresses, lets you scour a website for the required information, and enables you to feed in a JSON file and work with the provided data.
Read more…
Creating a clock in Sketch might not sound exciting at first, but we’ll discover how easy it is to recreate real-world objects in a very accurate way. You’ll learn how to apply multiple layers of borders and shadows, you’ll take a deeper look at gradients and you will see how objects can be rotated and duplicated in special ways. To help you along the way you can also download the Sketch editable file.
This is a rather advanced tutorial, so if you are not that savvy with Sketch yet and need some help, I would recommend to first read “Design a Responsive Music Player in Sketch” (Part One | Part Two) that cover a few key aspects in detail when working with Sketch. You can also have a look at my personal project sketchtips.info where I regularly provide tips and tricks about Sketch.
Read more…
Welcome to the second part of this tutorial, in which we will finish designing the music player that we started in part one. This includes creating the icons at the bottom, as well as making the music player responsive, so that all elements adapt to the width of the artboard and, thus, can be used for different device widths.
Our premise in creating all of the icons is to use basic shapes as often as possible, instead of custom vector elements. Shapes are much easier to set up and modify, and we will still be able to combine them into more complex forms using Boolean operations.
Read more…
Sketch is known for its tricky, advanced facets, but it’s not rocket science. In this article, we’ll get a taste of all the impressive designs Sketch is capable of bringing to life.
Read more…
Sketch lets you design interfaces, websites and icons with ease. To help you get the most out of this mighty tool, The Sketch Handbook will show you every aspect of it. Not in theory, but backed up by practical examples that you can follow along, step-by-step.
Read more…
Transitions can be painful. It is in our nature to resist change, even when the possibility of doing something new and different may be exciting. Changing your workflow can be a real challenge if you don’t know where to start or understand how to embark on the change.
I’ve met with many designers (graphic, interaction, UI, etc.) who stick to old software because they are familiar and in their comfort zone, or because they are too scared to take the “leap of faith” and try something new (even when they know their old software does not allow them to work efficiently and effectively enough).
Read more…
In the past year, adoption of Sketch at Google, where I work at, has taken off and is now a widely preferred tool. The more tools in our belts, the better, so here’s my take on why Sketch and the new material design system are a great match.
Tools are an extension of our hands, and as such, they should be versatile, quick and intuitive. A lot has changed between the print era of offset presses and the digital era of cross-platform screens. Developers have attempted to adapt our tools, but Sketch is perhaps the most successful app in this regard — its creators have removed the bloat, started afresh and presented a smaller, fit-for-purpose feature set. What may seem on the surface to be a simple drawing tool in fact nails the core workflows of digital design.
Read more…
If you’re a member of the web or UI design community, it’s been hard to avoid talking about Sketch over the last year. The launch of this design app shook up an industry dominated by Adobe for more than two decades, and it has caused an ongoing debate about whether Sketch is better than Photoshop and Illustrator (and Fireworks).
A longtime Photoshop user myself, I made the switch to Sketch in early 2014 and haven’t looked back. I love certain features of the program, such as the simple interface, file autosave and infinite canvas. However, plenty of other programs out there have similar features, and until the most recent update (Sketch 3.2), users were battling a lot of bugs in the app.
Read more…