When designing for digital spaces, it’s natural to default to digital mockup tools, but doing so cuts out a world of possibilities. Analog drawing can unleash your imagination and allow you to focus on what’s most important at the start: the ideas.
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Having a face-to-face meeting with your client can cause anxiety for those of us that push pixels for a living, but even the simplest kind of sketching can help. The sitemap meeting can be a minefield of multiple stakeholders, multi-dimensional categories, historical analytics, new products and mobile-first demands. Using a live illustration of a customer site journey, you can create a meaningful sitemap with which site visitors will resonate.
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There are a good number of benefits and reasons why you should consider integrating design workouts into your team. In this article, Arturas Leonovas shares some exercises which are worth trying out with your design team and get you all to train before the big game — together. Doing this at least once a month is a fun way for everyone to polish skills that they use every day. Not only that, the added benefit of team-building and knowledge-sharing will help everyone become the best versions of themselves.
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Have you tried drawing animals from circles? It can be quite a challenge, especially if you can only use a particular amount of circles. In this article, Dorota Pankowska explains how she created 13 animals with only 13 circles. The drawing challenge mostly consists of three Adobe applications: Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.
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Illustration is a great way to boost many of your skills and to experiment with drawing techniques, colors and composition. In this article, Igor Izhik will show you how these skills will make you a better specialist in any creative field by sharing how he approaches all stages of the illustration process and providing general techniques for creating vector illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. Just remember that a solid illustration requires patience and is rarely done quickly. The good news is that it pays off. Let’s take a closer look at it and see how it was made.
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People make all sorts of visual notes. An army of sketchnoters is out there, and everyone has their own style. Some do amazing sketches and lavish letters. Some translate complicated concepts into easy-to-grasp diagrams. But for the sake of this article, let’s keep it simple. Making your notes more interesting doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. It’s not like learning to play the piano or taking up diving. If you think sketchnoting looks fun, Elisabeth Irgens has some tips to get you started.
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Is sketching by hand more than a nostalgic activity? How is paper any different from a screen, especially when hardware is becoming more and more sophisticated? Is improving your hand-sketching skills really worthwhile when high-tech software is advancing every day?
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One way to gauge mobile experience is to look at the tools at our disposal. Prototyping tools enable us to build wireframes and click-dummies. We seem to be in a better position than ever to design great experiences in virtually no time. However, these tools come with a hidden cost: they tempt us to skip the key step necessary to creating a well-designed product — which is to take the time to understand the problem we are given.
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A new freebie for Smashing Magazine’s readers: two printable UX sketching and wireframing templates designed by Pixle. Enjoy Outline and Tapsize!
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The mobile Web has gotten a bum rap. It spends most of its time either in the shadow of the desktop or playing the role of the native app’s frumpy friend. Luckily, we’ve got the tools to change that. Progressive enhancement, mobile-first and responsive design can help lead us towards a more unified, future-friendly Web. That’s the good news. The bad news? These tools are worthless if you don’t have license to use them.
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