💭 Hacking Graphic Design or Sketch for Devs 💭
Hey hackers, designers and design hackers. It's your boy l0rdcafe. This post is a brief overview of my experience learning graphic design basics with Sketch. I'll be going through what I learned, built, and how useful these new skills are.
Sketch is a lighter and more affordable alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Sketch simplifies some tasks that otherwise would be rather complicated to execute in other applications.
It's also an extremely light application and moreover, allows you to copy the CSS of any asset to the clipboard and paste it to a text editor. Compared to Photoshop or other graphic design software, the CSS given by Sketch is incredibly clean, easily readable and concise.
Secondly, I used Lynda to complete a series of 4 Sketch courses. Starting off with Sketch Essential Training: The Basics, and designing the mockup website with the instructor using the downloadable exercise files. I quickly picked up on the basics of Sketch and hardly found anything too cumbersome to do.
From creating artboards, to drawing vector icons, creating symbols, and finally building a responsive website for 4 devices. This course covered the essential Sketch basics to be able to create, edit and export assets for web development or other purposes.
Afterwards, I completed the Sketch: Creating Vector Graphics course, which gets more into vector graphics in terms of drawing, editing, custom borders, Bezier vectors, Boolean operations and that culminated in building an average navigation toolbar.
The penultimate course named the Sketch: Style Guides & Asset Libraries concerned style guides, asset libraries and how to manage and build them both efficiently as well as professionally. By the end of the course, I'd learned how to build my own asset library by combining other libraries, how to properly name assets and organize them in case of collaborative work, and finally how to share asset libraries with others.
Lastly, Sketch for UX Design was the last course I finished and it was almost an aggregate of all the aforementioned skills giving a broad outline of Sketch and how it can be utilized to build for a range of devices including the likes of Apple Watch. Also, the course gets into several plugins, Sketch App Sources and how the Sketch Toolbox can be used to install a plethora of plugins created by the vibrant Sketch community.
To wrap up, Sketch is an impressively user-friendly tool that allows designers, and developers
to quickly draw up mockups, create icons, assets, asset libraries, among numerous other functions. With my newly-acquired Sketch nous, I made a fairly simple l0rdcafe logo (See?) as well as a mockup responsive design of a website for a fictional app for 4 devices in the projects section.