Mike, our head of Digital here at Cre8ion, spends much of his time creating websites. Mike has a lot to say about how much time Sketch has saved him, so we thought we would highlight some of its amazing features that have come to Mike’s aid.
For the uninitiated, Sketch is a proprietary vector graphics editor for Apple’s macOS, developed by the Dutch company Bohemian Coding. It won an Apple Design Award in 2012. (Wikipedia) Sketch makes working with vectors simple for Mac users, product designers, and UX and UI website designers.
So, just to explain, if you are not acquainted with Sketch, its function is to design and prototype what you are going to build (a website or an app for instance), a bit like sketching before painting a masterpiece.
We asked Mike, “What has Sketch done for you in terms of website UX /UI design?”
“Now I can present websites to clients as working prototypes so they can get a feel for how a website will work and feel before it’s out of the design stage. I can prototype our wireframes to get better UX before we even move to design. Sketch cloud enables me to send a website design prototype to a client so they can browse it on their own computer at home.”
“That’s great Mike, could you list any of the specific time saving benefits?”
“Changing site generic elements in the design such as header and footer can be done in one place instead of having to edit multiple files with Sketch symbols. If I’ve designed a website and the client wants the footer background colour changed for instance, before, I would have had to open up every PSD of every page I’d designed, make the change and export a new version for the client. In Sketch, I can make the change in the symbol created called Footer and it will dynamically update across the whole design on every page.”
“Anything else?”
“Another timesaver is that website assets are easily exportable to drop straight into a website when I’m building. Also, If I need a logo or any design element from my Sketch document to put into my website, I can isolate it and export it for easy use when building. Oh, yes, it doesn’t stop there, I can save brand colours in document preset colours so I don’t have to worry about looking up brand hex codes whenever I need a colour.”
A great feature of Sketch is that you can test-drive Sketch free for 30 days!
If your website needs updating, Mike and the team at Cre8ion would be delighted to help.