I used to be and am still at times, an avid Adobe Fireworks user. I strongly believe it was ahead of its time and it wasn’t given a proper chance to be the standout premier web design tool that many realised it was. Recently after moving to a MacBook Pro, I have started playing around with Sketch 3. I think it is fantastic, a great design tool and above all, really snappy (the exportable SVG feature is great).
It seems all the designers over at LayerVault News aka Designer News talk about on an almost daily basis is Sketch 3 by Bohemian Coding. This product is touted as a successor to Adobe’s now discontinued Fireworks application. I am a massive Fireworks fan, in-fact, I still use it over Photoshop. Things that Sketch 3 gets right… Ability to export SVG files Everything is a vector, so you can resize all vector items to your hearts content without them losing detail The UI is quite nice to look at It feels a lot more stable than Adobe Fireworks for most things (in the short few days I’ve been using it) Effects are all based on CSS. Unlike Photoshop which ships with numerous effects that aren’t easily replicable in CSS. Things that Sketch 3 does not get right… SVG export functionality is buggy and sometimes the result SVG file is wrong Inability to work with Fireworks PNG files (for an app pretty much shopped as a Fireworks alternative, this is a big deal) Inability to work with PSD files (they open, but they’re flattened) Grid system creation feels limited and not as flexible as Fireworks which allowed me to move individual guides around Source files for designs can’t be handed over to developers on platforms other than Mac OS who have a copy of Sketch 3 on their machine. Some argue developers shouldn’t get source designs, as a developer, I disagree as it makes getting font sizes, colours and spacing much easier Lack of option to export a Photoshop PSD file that can be imported into Photoshop and edited Understandably, Sketch is new on the scene and Bohemian Coding has significantly smaller team working on Sketch, a smaller budget and hasn’t had the luxury like Adobe to work on the product for 20+ years.
An interesting topic I thought would be better served as a post. Are email confirmation fields still needed in modern web forms? Recently I was tasked with building a registration form. This form had a lot of fields in it including an email and confirm email field. I made the case for removing it because I felt another field was just a barrier to entry and in the age of “Sign Up Using Facebook” buttons anyway, the tolerance people have for long forms has dwindled.
I wouldn’t really call them proper PSD’s, but Apple has released a Photoshop PSD files for its latest models of iPhone, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. If you just need some simplistic images of the devices to add in marketing shots, that is all you will be able to do with them. They’re more for mockups than they are proper development as Apple doesn’t want people moving other elements around, presumably to keep integrity in the design intact or something like that.
Although I am not a designer, it doesn’t stop me from trying and throughout my trials I’ve been experimenting with different grid systems. I used 960.gs for a while but it seemed too small, so then I experimented with 1140px for a while and it was good, but I’ve since gone bigger and better and believe to have found one of the best grid templates for web design. After previously trying a 15 column 1200px grid, I soon ran into some limitations, a major limitation being the fact 15 doesn’t evenly divide by two (which for a theme I’ve been designing is something I need).