Tags: sketch

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Chat is rarely a suitable interface for most tasks. Here, Maggie Appleton explores and prototypes some alternatives.

UXLondon 2021

Here’s a great write-up (with sketch notes) of last week’s conference portion of UX Fest:

There was a through-line of ethics through the whole conference that I enjoyed. The “design is the underdog” is tired and no longer true. I think that asking ourselves “now that we are here, how do we avoid causing harm?” is a much more mature conversation.

The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships – The Public Domain Review

Scrimshaws and sketches.

Feels like a Zooniverse project waiting to happen.

Blade Runner Sketchbook (PDF)

I was sad to hear of the passing of Syd Mead last week. Here’s a sketchbook of his remarkable work for Blade Runner.

UX Workshop | Trys Mudford

I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!

Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.

Intro to Font Metrics

Font metrics help the computer determine things like the default spacing between lines, how high or low sub and super scripts should go, and how to align two differently sized pieces of text next to each other.

Designing With Code

How mucking about in HTML and CSS can lead to some happy accidents.

‘Sfunny, people often mention the constraints and limitations of “designing in the browser”, but don’t recognise that every tool—including Sketch and Photoshop—comes with constraints and limitations. It’s just that those are constraints and limitations that we’ve internalised; we no longer even realise they’re there.

Magic Paintbox – Illuminated – Medium

What we get from the pattern library is time and freedom to be creative. I’ve seen people claim pattern libraries are the death of creativity and innovation in design. For us, it’s the opposite of that.

Steve Jobs on Prototypes - Snook.ca

I’ve thought often of how our design and prototyping tools for the web are often not of the web. Tools like Photoshop and Sketch and Invision create approximations but need to walk the line between being a tool to build native apps and to build web apps. They do well in their ability to quickly validate designs but do little to validate technical approach.

5 ways having a shared design system has helped us ship our designs faster – Product at Canva

The steps that the Canva team took to turbocharge their design ops.

I’ll talk about why creating a shared design system has boosted our organizational productivity—and how you can help your teams improve product quality while reducing your company’s ‘design debt’.

Sketching in the Browser – SEEK blog – Medium

A step-by-step account of trying to find a way to keep Sketch files in sync with the code in a pattern library. The solution came from HTML Sketchapp, a more agnostic spiritual successor to AirBnB’s React Sketchapp.

The contract was incredibly straightforward—as long as you generated HTML, you could import it into Sketch.

After some tinkering, Mark Dalgleish came up with a command line tool to automate the creation of Sketch libraries from HTML elements with data-sketch- attributes.

Creating a pattern library in Sketch, Roobottom.com

A smart approach to creating patterns as symbols in Sketch. Sounds like diligence and vigilance is required to make it work, but then, that’s true of any pattern library.

Painting with Code : Airbnb Design

Very clever stuff here from Jon in the tradition of Bret Victor—alter Sketch files by directly manipulating code (React, in this case).

I’m not sure the particular use-case outlined here is going to apply much outside of AirBnB (just because the direction of code-to-Sketch feels inverted from most processes) but the underlying idea of treating visual design assets and code as two manifestations of the same process …that’s very powerful.

Stark

A plug-in for Sketch that allows you to simulate colour blindnesses and check colour contrasts.

Patterns Day is not one of Clearleft’s slick’n’smooth conferences like dConstruct or UX London. It’s more of a spit’n’sawdust affair, like Responsive Day Out.

You can probably tell from looking at the Patterns Day website that it wasn’t made by a crack team of designers and developers—it’s something I threw together over the course of a few days. I had a lot of fun doing it.

I like designing in the browser. That’s how I ended up designing Resilient Web Design, The Session, and Huffduffer back in the day. But there’s always the initial problem of the blank page. I mean, I had content to work with (the information about the event), but I had no design direction.

My designery colleagues at Clearleft were all busy on client projects so I couldn’t ask any of them to design a website, but I thought perhaps they’d enjoy a little time-limited side exercise in producing ideas for a design direction. Initially I was thinking they could all get together for a couple of hours, lock themselves in a room, and bash out some ideas as though it were a mini hack farm. Coordinating calendars proved too tricky for that. So Jon came up with an alternative: a baton relay.

Remember Layer Tennis? I once did the commentary for a Layer Tennis match and it was a riot—simultaneously terrifying and rewarding.

Anyway, Jon suggested something kind of like that, but instead of a file being batted back and forth between two designers, the file would passed along from designer to designer. Each designer gets one art board in a Sketch file. You get to see what the previous designers have done, leaving you to either riff on that or strike off in a new direction.

The only material I supplied was an early draft of text for the website, some photos of the first confirmed speakers, and some photos I took of repeating tiles when I was in Porto (patterns, see?). I made it clear that I wasn’t looking for pages or layouts—I was interested in colour, typography, texture and “feel.” Style tiles, yes; comps, no.

Jon

Jon kicks things off and immediately sets the tone with bright, vibrant colours. You can already see some elements that made it into the final site like the tiling background image of shapes, and the green-bordered text block. There are some interesting logo ideas in there too, some of them riffing on LEGO, others riffing on illustrations from Christopher Alexander’s book, A Pattern Language. Then there’s the typeface: Avenir Next. I like it.

James G

Jimmy G is up next. He concentrates on the tiles idea. You can see some of the original photos from Porto in the art board, alongside his abstracted versions. I think they look great, and I tried really hard to incorporate them into the site, but I couldn’t quite get them to sit with the other design elements. Looking at them now, I still want to get them into the site …maybe I’ll tinker with the speaker portraits to get something more like what James shows here.

Ed

Ed picks up the baton and immediately iterates through a bunch of logo ideas. There’s something about the overlapping text that I like, but I’m not sure it fits for this particular site. I really like the effect of the multiple borders though. With a bit more time, I’d like to work this into the site.

James B

Batesy is the final participant. He has some other nice ideas in there, like the really subtle tiling background that also made its way into the final site (but I’ll pass on the completely illegible text on the block of bright green). James works through two very different ideas for the logo. One of them feels a bit too busy and chaotic for me, but the other one …I like it a lot.

I immediately start thinking “Hmm …how could I make this work in a responsive way?” This is exactly the impetus I needed. At this point I start diving into CSS. Not only did I have some design direction, I’m champing at the bit to play with some of these ideas. The exercise was a success!

Feel free to poke around the Patterns Day site. And while you’re there, pick up a ticket for the event too.

Sketchnotes from AEA Seattle | Krystal Higgins

I love Krystal’s sketchnotes from my talk at An Event Apart Seattle. Follows on nicely from Ethan’s too.

sketch-to-fractal-comp on Vimeo

Everyone in the Fractal Slack channel is currently freaking out about this. Veeeeery iiiiinteresting!

Sketching at Clearleft.

An interview with Batesy that gives a nice insight into life at Clearleft.

He’s sketching mad, that one!

A 5 day sprint with Clear Left exploring library self-service machine software – Leon Paternoster

Myself and Batesy spent last week in Ipswich doing an intense design sprint with Suffolk Libraries. Leon has written up process from his perspective as the client—I’ll try to get a case study up on the Clearleft website soon.

This is really great write-up; it captures the sense of organised chaos:

I can’t recommend this kind of research sprint enough. We got a report, detailed technical validation of an idea, mock ups and a plan for how to proceed, while getting staff and stakeholders involved in the project — all in the space of 5 days.

Learn Sketch 3 - Design+Code

A very handy introduction to Sketch from an iOS-specific book. See also the subsequent chapter, Mastering Sketch 3.