Product Engineering
Sketch 101: How to Use It for UI/UX Design
The word design is quite vast,
and there is a lot to explore and know about it in detail. There are many areas
of designing, and one can easily find skilled designers having expertise in a
specific area like UI, UX, product designers, graphic designers, interaction
designers, information architects, and many more. Being a designer is not easy,
and it includes various responsibilities like continuously finding problems and
creating solutions for them. Also, in today’s time, when a website is the
backbone of any business, especially for start-ups, having a good UI UX
designer is a must. If the website is hard to navigate, and users need
to make efforts to look out for something, then you may be turning your
customers away without even knowing it. Good web design helps keep your leads
on the page and let them not to divert to other competitors.
According to a survey, within
three seconds of being on a website, users decide whether or not they want to
take services from that website. And here, the design and content play a major
role. If there is no effort done in designing a web, it is clear for the user
that the business won’t make any effort in helping them even.
Thus, the customer’s footfall,
which is ultimately the success of your website/app, entirely depends on User
Interface and User Experience. And the work of UI/UX
designers depends upon the tools they use. Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator,
Fireworks, InVision are a few of the known names. Previously when just Adobe
products were being used for design, in recent times many new apps have come in
trend and one of the popular names in between them is “Sketch.” And with time,
it has become an essential part of any modern UI designer’s toolkit. It's an
indie design tool that is much easier to use as compared to Photoshop and
Illustrator.
What is Sketch?
The Sketch is a well-known
digital design app for Mac and is mainly used in UI and UX Design of mobile,
web, desktop, and wearables. It was first released on 7 September 2010 and is
primarily known as a vector graphics editor for macOS. It is very lightweight
and does not need a huge monster PC to run it. It is much easier compared to
other design apps, and anyone with a design background can easily switch to
Sketch. Also, the graphics are easily scalable, thus its license model is just
a one-time with one year of free updates after which the user can purchase the
license for the next year of updates or use the last version. It takes into
account whatever we visualize, and a problem visualized is a problem halved.
With the new feature inherited, one can easily use Sketch for wireframing,
prototyping, and collaboration.
The only drawback observed is
that it is a bit expensive. Still, the benefits like gain in productivity have
made Sketch now been used officially as the application of choice for
most website design and development companies. It is a perfect
software to design for multiple devices.
The above benefit explains why Sketch is undebatable the best tool for designers, let us now discuss in detail a few truly great features of Sketch and how to use it as a UI/UX Designer.
Clean Interface
The first screen that you see
when you open up Sketch is a clean interface. Sketch lets you focus just on the
design and cuts out all the fluffs.
Code Friendly Designs
Anything you create through
Sketch can be reproduced with CSS, and hence, it works for both website
and mobile app developers and designers. Being on the same
page with the developer is quite beneficial, especially when they start coding
up your designs.
The Artboards
Sketch has both pages and an
artboard. For UI or UX design projects, multiple pages get in use like
onboarding flow of an app, another for the core actions, one more for settings,
and so on. Sketch lets you jump onto various artboards easily on a single
window hence, you need not open up multiple design files while working on the
project. Also, it helps you keep these together and organized.
Grids and Layout
Sketch lets you layout grids
easily for each artboard, and the good part is that as soon as you set the
total width, number of columns, and gutter width, a nice red translucent grid
is overlaid on your design instantly. These designing responsive layouts boost
productivity.
Also Read: Things
You Should Know Before You Hire A UI/UX Designer
Symbols and Styles
The symbol is the most powerful
feature of Sketch, it allows you to group many elements like Buttons,
Navigation, Headers, Footers, thus helps you to reuse these throughout the
project. This saves the time of yours and the team.
The style element of Sketch allows you to sync through a document and maintain consistency. Once the text style changes at a place, it gets reflected in all other instances within your design also.
Sketching for UX/UI is all about: -
Getting Ideas Out
The first step for a UI/UX
designer is to sit back and get the ideas out. Discussing with the team
and creating an outline before jumping straight into the tools is beneficial in
the long run. Brainstorm every possibility that you have in your minds to
select the best design to use. It is always recommended to visualize the idea
so that you can understand how something should look or work in detail. Out of
numerous ideas you need to decide which is the most efficient in the context of
your task and the various constraints of the project.
Agile Designing Process
Inside the Sketch, some plugins
come nicely integrated with hotkeys. By the time Sketch has introduced native
prototyping, it is in great help with organizing and documenting your project.
This makes the navigation styles and symbols much faster. The symbol has become
an even more popular feature of Sketch as it lets you reuse elements — like
buttons, icons, or even much larger components — easily across your document.
Conclusion
A good design is an essential
part of every website and app. These days more and more companies are moving
towards digital transformation for which they are always in need of a
good enterprise
mobility solution provider that can help them create their own digital
presence, and reach more and more people via mobile apps and websites too.
Designers use multiple tools and approaches, out of which some workout and some
not. The Sketch is a powerful tool and has become a crucial one for today’s UI
and UX designers. The regular feature updates improve the workflow
considerably. Hope the above excerpt will help those who are just getting
started in a UX career, or who are making the shift to Sketch for a design
workflow.
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