Polishing my design skills

Sketch must be one of my most-used apps atm. Especially for the last weeks, since we’re working on a new look & feel for Mindwave. 

Sketch is a great tool, for sure. But most importantly, it changed how we design.

In general, before the summer we worked in a waterfall process. I made my prototypes in Axure, Martijn made his designs in Sketch. All improvement, even small content changes, needed to be handled by Martijn.

At one point, I didn’t want to bother Martijn with small changes anymore. So I installed Sketch to do them myself. 

Then I really got the hang of it. Small changes became bigger changes. Bigger changes lead to new pages. Meaning, I’m not prototyping in Axure anymore. I’m designing my ideas and improvements in Sketch. Plus, my designs look surprisingly great ?

‘Look at me, I’m a designer!’ 

Well, I didn’t discover a hidden talent and do not want to call me a designer (yet ;). I’m just learning by doing. Using a magical ingredient that is really helpful to me: design components.

Designing with design components

We already designed (and implemented) a lot of pages and design elements for Mindwave. They are all in Sketch, somewhere. So when I make some changes, I always keep existing components in mind. When I prototype, I just copy-paste a page that looks-a-like and take it off from there. 

Our color pallet is also in Sketch. So I know which colors to use.

The only other things I need to do is keep an eye on margins, white space and to try and make it pixel-perfect. These things aren’t new to me. My Concept7 experience got me covered here. 

Finetuning

I share my designs with Martijn. He is sharing his designs with me. We ping-pong with feedback and ideas.

During our (two)weekly meetup we go over all designs and finetune them all, together. I love these days! Learning new skills and improving Mindwave. What’s not to love 🙂