Introducing Sketch for UX and UI

An overview of Bohemian Sketch, the digital design tool for OS X. You’ll learn specifically why Sketch is gaining popularity among UX and UI designers as a tool for creating mobile apps and websites.

Dive right in and learn the Sketch workspace. You’ll be using Sketch’s artboard feature in order to begin building a series of screens for a mobile app.

Discover how Sketch’s Styles and Group Symbols allow you to reuse artwork and styles within your projects. You’ll learn when you should be using one feature over the other as well the benefits (and limitations) of both.

If you’re familiar with the way CSS allows you to change various properties of your text, then you’ll feel right at home learning how the Text Styles feature allows you to synchronize your text appearance across an entire project. Additionally, you’ll take advantage of Templates in order to add pre-built components such as mobile UI elements or icons to your design.

Learn how the Pages feature in Sketch allows you to distribute and logically group your artwork across an entire project, thereby improving your organization and efficiency when working within a single document.

Grids are used frequently in UX and UI designs, and Sketch makes it easy to duplicate artwork and artboards into rows and/or columns with the Make Grid feature. You’ll learn how to use it in common situations such as creating forms or for when you need to quickly duplicate entire screens within your project.

Plugins are a way for third-party authors to extend the functionality of Sketch and are quickly becoming a key benefit of the application. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to install a plugin and then take a look at two in particular that will help UX and UI designers in their projects.

Exporting assets is a task that few designers look forward to, but Sketch somehow manages to make the process fun and rewarding. You’ll learn how to export wireframes/mockups to PDF, the difference between exporting layers vs. slices and how Sketch integrates with the OS X share features in order to make collaborating with team members and clients much easier.

Sketch has limited interactive features, but when paired with Invision, a web and mobile prototyping platform, you can turn your static pages into interactive ones. Discover how to organize your Sketch artboards, add hotspots to link your screens together, create basic animations for mobile interactions, and export your prototypes for collaborative purposes.