When it comes to Illustrator, Mike is simply a guru no-one knows it in and out better than the Tennessee-based interface designer and creative technical author. One man keeping close tabs on the vector tool’s latest transformations is Sessions College instructor and Illustrator boffin Mike Hamm. We’ll always use the tools that allow us to bring ideas to fruition the quickest.Adobe Illustrator is constantly changing to suit the needs of today’s graphic and interactive designers. However, a year from now we may be using completely different tools that allow us to tighten the feedback loop between creation and validation. Right now, we wireframe in OmniGraffle, create mockups in Photoshop, prototype user flows with Flinto and prototype custom interactions with Pixate. Having the right setup is vital to making the most of your time as a designer. When words and sketches aren’t enough, only then is it worth investing the time to fully prototype an interaction with a tool like Pixate or Framer. Other times, a sketch or wireframe is enough to communicate how a screen should behave, especially if a Style Guide exists. Sometimes, a few words can sufficiently describe layout rules or an interaction and take much less time than a prototype to compose. Deliver just enough to communicate the essence of the design. It’s inefficient and nearly impossible to create and maintain full-fidelity mockups of every screen for every screen size in every possible state. (And link to that Style Guide in the App Map!) Your developers will appreciate your adoption of their mantra, and your future self will thank you for keeping things maintainable. Does an editable text field really need to have 5 different variations? Should tappable elements share a similar appearance? Create modular components that can be used throughout the project and organize them in a Style Guide.
#Export from flinto to webpage series#
Think about mobile design as a holistic system instead of a series of disparate screens. It’s worthwhile for designers to adopt as well.
Don’t repeat yourselfĭevelopers love to repeat this phrase. Creative solutions may come from coloring outside the lines, but make sure you’re still coloring on the page. And do your best to understand exactly how your design deliverables will be rendered once the final product is in the user’s hands. If you’re designing for Android, familiarize yourself with the old and new guidelines. If you’re designing for iOS, use the Human Interface Guidelines as a foundation. If your client went through the trouble to create brand guidelines, stick to them. If you don’t understand the business goals of a project, ask questions until you do.
This pleases the cat for various reasons. Place a box in front of a cat, and it will attempt to get inside. Maintaining this resource does take a significant amount of time, but it’s time well spent compared to sorting through a dozen PDFs or tracking down decisions in archived email threads. Clients, Project Managers and Developers should always be able to see the current plan of record by navigating to that URL. At stable|kernel, we create an “App Map” in OmniGraffle and export it as a webpage hosted at a static URL. Everything in one placeĮvery project should have a design hub that links to all relevant design deliverables (sketches, wireframes, mockups, interaction notes, prototypes, etc…). Mockups lie, but the app tells the truth. Instead of going back to perfect mockups and prototypes, sit alongside developers and help them polish the actual app. As a designer, take ownership of the finished product by looking at development builds before your work sees the light of day. They’ll see the final product as an app on their device. In reality, users will never see those perfect mockups with model avatars who have conveniently short names. But too often, a designer’s involvement ends after polishing up a round of static screenshots.
Mockups and prototypes are valuable tools to communicate design ideas.
Here are some guiding mobile design principles that help keep designers on track with a team of brilliant developers.
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