Designer Notes

Things I encounter in my day to day as a designer++, both design and not design.

[designer-notes-blog]

Learning Sketch

It’s about time that I make the jump from designing websites in Photoshop to doing them in Sketch! 

Early adopters and UI designers might be surprised to learn that there are still people using Photoshop for this, but when it’s what you’ve become used to over many, many years it’s hard to make the jump. Harder still is finding the time to get the hang of the shortcuts and features, enough to be able to mock up a design without going over the assigned time budget. 

It’s been on my weekend learning list for over six months, but that list is crazy long, and with my work being unwilling to invest in a license for me it didn’t seem to be a high priority. But with new, more UI driven projects coming up it’s become clear that Photoshop just isn’t the right tool for the job, so I’ve finally sold them (and myself) on the necessity of trying something new.

So far I’ve done a half day workshop, and already I feel pretty convinced that this was the right choice. We’ll see how it goes in my first project with it, but here’s some thoughts so far:

Sketch doesn’t replace everything that Photoshop can do - I don’t think any piece of software should, because that’s the reason Photoshop is a huge, confusing mess.

The aspect it does replace pretty well is the ability to bring together interface design elements in a way that better mimics how they would appear in a browser or app. Layouts, symbols and styles can be present in Photoshop with some wrangling, but it’s much simpler and cleaner in Sketch because it was designed that way to begin with, rather than growing out of a photo editing app.

Vector manipulation is pretty good, although it doesn’t feel as powerful as Illustrator for illustration. For designing interfaces and simple icons though, it’s more than enough.

There’s various simple layer effects, but this is not the tool for photo editing or manipulation. Thankfully this isn’t really something that’s often part of my design process.

Relearning the keyboard shortcuts is essential, as the toolbars don’t show as much at once as Adobe products do. Some shortcuts are the same, some different. This is a good cheatsheet.

Keeping different artboards and pages neatly in one file (without it getting insanely huge) sounds very appealing.

The ability to make any layer or grouping of layers exportable, to different file formats or resolutions, is far easier to use than Photoshop’s Generate (which I had high hopes for but never quite took off). Also a good reason to name things logically rather than “Rectangle 423″.

Working with typography is better in some ways, but in others pretty clunky. I found it frustrating that whilst you can set text to style uppercase, it doesn’t apply whilst you’re editing it - making things like tracking difficult.

I’m sure I’ll encounter things that will frustrate me like with any piece of software, but so far it’s looking pretty promising.

[designer-notes-blog]

Pulse stats

I hate this term. What’s the point of statistics for an exact moment time? Isn’t data over time, examining trends and dismissing the outliers, what really matters?

[designer-notes-blog]

Build beautiful, simple, free moodboards for sharing designs, inspiration, and ideas quickly and easily!

Saving this one for future reference, because Invision is a bit too expensive to use for a side hustle.

[designer-notes-blog]

Hello World

I've created yet another blog. I have too many, but I try to keep things nicely in their boxes so people don't get bored and things don't get confusing.

This blog is about being a designer in the digital realm, and how it no longer fits neatly into a box (less than before even), and things have gotten very confusing.

Once upon a time, “web designer” would have accurately described what I did - designing websites. But digital encompasses so much more than just the web now, and my day to day often ventures outside the bounds of digital as well. Whilst digital design has broadened in definition, many designers have specialised in one particular aspect - UX design, Product design, UI design.

As the majority of the design team at a smallish agency, specialising isn't a luxury I can afford - and I'm still not entirely sure that's what I want to do anyway. I currently spend less than half of my time doing what many would think a designer does - visually designing stuff in Photoshop - with the rest divided between front end development, the planning and wire framing side of design, graphic design and whatever no one else is available to do at the time. At the moment I'm more of a digital designer plus a bunch of other stuff. A designer++.

So anyway, this blog will be a record of things I encounter in my day to day as a designer++, both design and not design. It'll probably have some anxieties about whether I'm screwing up my career or wondering if I'm actually good at anything, but also random links and snippets of code. It will be a bit all over the place, because that's just what being a designer is these days.

Also feel free to ask me things! I will do my best to answer :)