For a while now, Sketch has been the de facto application of choice for UX and UI designers. But in the last year or two, we have seen many new contenders for the Sketch’s crown. Two of them that have made the biggest strides are Figma and Adobe XD. In this article, Ashish Bogawat will try to summarize my thoughts on how Figma and Adobe XD compete with Sketch and what unique features each one of them brings to the table. He will also reference some other alternative apps that are aiming to become leaders in the same niche.
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Whether you’re a designer or developer, it can be challenging to stay current in this fast-paced world where it feels like new tools are Product Hunted on a weekly basis. If you’re working in a larger team, and especially if you’re working in an enterprise or b2b (business-to-business) context, being able to make even small improvements in efficiency can lead to huge increases in the effectiveness of your design organization. In this article Paul Hanaoka will show you how large teams can benefit from using more open, collaborative tooling and how to make adoption and migration feasible and pleasant.
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Design systems have changed the way we design and build applications. They are quickly becoming a cornerstone of an organization’s digital product strategy. In this article, Nick Babich presents a tool that offers a ready-to-use design system that can be adapted to your individual needs: meet Indigo.Design. This tool attempts to solve this problem by introducing a unified platform for visual design, UX prototyping, code generation and app development. Using this platform increases the chances that you will create a design system that takes root and becomes an essential part of the organization.
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The Framer team recently changed course with the announcement of a new prototyping tool, Framer X. Lachezar Petkov got to play with it during the beta phase, and in this article he adresses UI and UX designers who would like to learn more about Framer X’s prototyping abilities. Since it is a brand new product, you don’t need to be familiar with the older Framer application to read along. However, a little bit of familiarity with HTML, CSS, React, JavaScript and Node.js are beneficial.
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Let’s be honest: It’s not the design files that become bigger by magic. It’s designers who fill their files with unused, unoptimized and hidden elements that take unnecessary space. There are huge Sketch files that exist, and not only do they slow down Sketch, but also any designer’s productivity. In this article, Ahmed Sulaiman introduces a menu bar application that is bound to help you get rid of this headache.
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Building your own app really gives you the ability to create anything you can imagine. If you are a designer, surely you have seen plenty of designs that are not perfect, and you should feel OK with your app’s design not being perfect too. You have to start somewhere, and with the help of other designers and developers, you will improve. In this tutorial, Craig Clayton is going to look at one page of an existing app and teach you how to get the design into Xcode. The design for this app was done using an app called Sketch. Sketch allows you to design anything from websites to mobile apps. It is my preference for designing mobile apps.
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In this article, Nikola Lazarević will show you how to create a very realistic and detailed vector illustration of a watch using basic shapes, layer styles and cool Sketch functions such as “Rotate Copies” and “Make Grid.” No bitmap images will be used, which means you will be able to easily adapt the final image to different sizes and resolutions. While Sketch is undoubtedly an excellent UI design tool, it can be used as a powerful illustration tool as well. So, in this tutorial, he’ll walk you through the process of creating the iconic Heuer Autavia wrist chronograph, all in vectors.
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In the last few years, traditional computers have ceded dominance to smaller screens, including tablets, mobile phones, smartwatches and more. As the craft has evolved, so has its toolset; and from one app to rule them all, we have gotten to a point where it seems like a new contender among UI design tools crops up every month. And many of the new UI design tools look pretty good and promising. At the moment, Sketch has grown in popularity and for a good reason: The developers of Sketch have figured out exactly what interface designers have been looking for and have steadily added functionality to address those needs. The pace of development of Sketch has been phenomenal, to say the least.
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Sketch has delivered a robust design platform with a refreshing, simple user interface. The open nature of the Sketch plugin system means that anyone can identify a need, write a plugin and share it with the community. A major barrier is stopping those eager to take part: Designers and front-end developers must learn how to write a plugin. What if users could write plugins using technologies they are already familiar with? In this article, Zachary Schuessler covers the usage of WebView technology to create a plugin using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
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Sketch makes the day-to-day life of a user interface designer a lot better. Mundane little things such as measuring distances and sizes are now much easier and quicker. You can automate parts of your workflow and use real data in your Sketch designs. You can also organize your files more optimally, and more. If you’re a UI designer and are still using mostly Photoshop or Illustrator, Lachezar Petkov highly recommends you try Sketch. You might never want to look back!
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