Sketch has revolutionized the world of mobile application design by providing the tools to transform yourself into a professional app designer with only a few hours of training. This course will teach you to use the Sketch to design dynamic, development-ready mobile app user interfaces that impress clients and engage users.
Learn to Design Beautiful, High-Quality Mobile Application UI with Sketch's Powerful Tools and Smooth Workflow
Sketch has revolutionized the world of mobile application design by providing the tools to transform yourself into a professional app designer with only a few hours of training. This course will teach you to use the Sketch to design dynamic, development-ready mobile app user interfaces that impress clients and engage users.
Learn to Design Beautiful, High-Quality Mobile Application UI with Sketch's Powerful Tools and Smooth Workflow
Master the essential principles and tools of Sketch.
Discover design techniques that will enhance your creative potential.
Learn and implementUI best practices to ensure quality and usability.
Journey from concept to completion by creating a sample mobile application.
Find Out Why Google, Apple, and Facebook Designers Use Sketch
Many of Silicon Valley’s most established and fastest growing companies swear by Sketch when designing UIs for mobile applications because it’s fast and intuitive, and produces stunning final products.
Sketch isn’t just a tool for designing pretty apps, It’s a tool for composing UI components and design patterns that scale without effort as projects grow more complex.
When it comes to styling, we’re able to use multiple color and gradient fills, borders, and automatically scaling images on a single layer to keep out layers list clean and organized.
It gives us the ability to reuse styles and elements throughout a design — so that you never have to waste time making the same change in multiple places. And those reused elements can be nested inside one another and then tweaked or swapped out to create powerful and flexible design systems.
Contents and Overview
Whether you’re a beginner or a veteran designer with experience using Photoshop and Illustrator, you will find this course valuable in the way that it blends step-by-step instruction with hands-on, customizable exercises:
Mobile App Design from A to Z: With 55 lectures and 4.5 hours of content, this course covers everything from layers, shapes, and styling to text editing to exporting finished projects.
Test Your Knowledge: Periodic quizzes will review key concepts and ensure that you are mastering the content.
Interactive Design Project: Together with the instructor, you will build a sample UI for an iPhone music player app. Included Sketch documents allow you to pick up at any point in the project.
After completing this course, you will understand how to design high-quality mobile application UI using Sketch and you will be better prepared to meet the demands of your clients and developers.
Let's take a moment to get to know one another and talk about why we are here.
Where does Sketch fit into the world as a design application? Let's talk about what makes Sketch such a strong application for user interface design (UI design) and what makes it a better choice for this type of design work than Photoshop.
Let's get the included fonts installed into your computer's Font Book before we get started.
Let's discuss the difference between vector graphics in Sketch vs raster or pixel based graphics like images and photographs.
Time to get familiar with Sketch by learning where our tools are. Here we cover the toolbar, layers list, inspector, and touch on the canvas.
Every Sketch document is made up of simple parts. Pages, canvas, and artboards. Let's learn how the pieces come together.
Getting the size of your artboards right before you begin designing sets you up for success. Artboard sizes may look strange at first glance because they appear to be super "low res". Let's find out why.
Let's get into best practices for staying out of trouble with save, save as, and autosave. Autosave can be an extremely useful feature when it is properly understood and properly taken advantage of.
Let's make sure we are on the same page
Let's get familiar with the design elements which will combine to form anything and everything you build in Sketch.
Time to get hands on. Let's master making selections and positioning things on our canvas. We will be learning some shortcuts that make even simple navigation much faster and easier.
Sketch gives us a number of tool to stay pixel perfect. Eyeballing things works for most artwork, but in software design there is a lot to be said for visual organization and precision.
Sometimes the best way to align things is to design on a grid. Using grids and guides, spacing and aligning objects can be effortless.
As your design becomes more complex, layers will begin to get in the way of other layers. Let's look at how keep things from getting in our way.
Are you a pro at navigating around Sketch documents?
Here is the often requested cheat sheet of Sketch shortcuts. It's a giant JPG that makes for a nice desktop background :)
Its about time we begin adding content to our canvas. Let's take a close look at the different vector shapes we have to choose from.
Now that we know how to add shapes to our canvas, let's begin assembling the basic shapes that will form our app.
Before we continue, let's put a little bit of polish on the elements of our blockframe to help differentiate them from one another.
Sketch wouldn't be a true vector drawing application without the ability to draw your own custom shapes.
Here we look at the two tools within Sketch to draw our own shapes from scratch.
Let's take a moment to practice drawing with the Vector Tool.
Boolean Operations are an incredible tool within Sketch which allow us to combine basic shapes to create more complex ones. You'll be impressed with how much you can accomplish with simple shapes and Boolean Operations.
Let's take a few minutes to put Boolean Operations into practice and see how quickly basic shapes become something much more interesting.
Masking in Sketch can be very, very easy and very, very useful. On the other hand, it can be a bit confusing to figure out on your own. In this lesson I show you how to keep making simple and get your masks under control.
In Sketch, it is easy and intuitive to grab the handles around an object and drag them to scale the object up or down. The problem with this becomes clear when borders or rounded corners are involved. Dragging the handles scales the path, but does not scale the effects in proportion. This lesson demonstrates how to scale an object or group of objects along with its effects.
It's not unusual to need things to be lined up with one another and spaced even from one another. While it might be less common, you may want things lined up and spaced both vertically, as well as horizontally. In this tutorial I show you how easy it is in Sketch 3 to organize and align objects on such a grid. Also how to duplicate an object into rows and columns.
While Adobe Illustrator and Sketch are both vector drawing applications, they aren't exactly joined in holy matrimony. If you're a designer using Illustrator, these tips will make your life a lot easier when bringing artwork over.
Let's finish populating our app with graphics before we style them.
Make sure you are not geometrically challenged in Sketch
We are ready to beginning styling our app. Let's start with our different types of shape fills. Colors, gradients, and patterns; its all here.
Let's dig into some details about one of the most important "primitives" we use for design. Colors.
Borders, or "strokes", can be used in a number of ways to style objects or paths. Let's see how width, color, joints, miters, and end caps make borders useful.
Shadows are a simple and elegant way to add depth and dimensionality to your design. Let's go over some tips for incorporating shadows.
Blending Modes and opacity allow us to get one layer to have transparency or blending with layers below. Beautiful and complex effects can be created with little effort.
There are several different types of blur effects that can be applied in Sketch. Let's compare them and review one of the more misunderstood blur types: the Background Blur.
As we style more and more objects in our design, the more we may find ourselves doing the same tasks over and over again. One of the recurring themes throughout this course is how to avoid doing repetitive tasks. Let's learn how to avoid repetitive styling.
Now that we know how to copy and paste style from one object to another, let's look at an amazing feature in Sketch that allows us to share styles between similar objects so that they always remain in sync with one another.
Time to take what we've learned and apply it to some finishing touches to our design.
Style is subjective. Knowing your tools is not.
Time to add text to our design and get familiar with the text tools available to us.
Area text allows us to insert paragraphs of text that remain within a bounding box. Let's look at the ins and outs of text boxes and styling the text within those boxes.
When we Sketch open documents on computers that don't have the necessary fonts installed, Sketch gives us a chance to make it right. Let's look at how.
We still have some text layers to add before our content is complete. Let's wrap that up before we continue.
Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.
Symbols are a feature that truly set Sketch apart from other design applications. Using symbols, we can reuse design elements rapidly and keep the content of these design elements completely synchronized throughout our document. Making global design changes could not be easier thanks to Symbols.
Make sure you understand one of Sketch's greatest tools
While image editing is certainly better suited to raster image editing applications like Photoshop, there are still a few tools within Sketch for making simple adjustments.
In a world where our users devices vary in size, we find ourselves designing for multiple screens sizes more often than not. Whether you face this particular challenge or just want to make your symbols more flexible and reusable, Resizing Constraints in Sketch are sure to become your best friend. Beginners and advanced Sketch users can save a lot of time and headaches by spending a quick 15 minutes soaking up exactly how Resizing Constraints in Sketch work.
With Color Variables, you can set colors that synchronize across your document. When you make changes to a Color Variable, those changes appear across all of the layers that use it. You can create Color Variables that are local to a specific document or share them in a Library to use in other designs. Color Variables can speed up your workflow and keep designs organized. They synchronize across your document. When you change a Color Variable it will update any layer that uses it.
When you click the Export button in the toolbar, Sketch will pop down a sheet listing all exportable layers in the canvas; artboards, slices and regular layers. You can export some or all of these from there. Let's start by focusing on Artboards.
Exporting a layer by itself means that no other elements on the canvas will be exported with it. If there's a layer on top or a background below it, neither of those will be included in the export. This is how we break our design apart into individual assets to export for developers to build our actual app.
Last and most definitely not least, will you be able to get your design turned into something functional?
You made it to the end of the course! Take a moment to celebrate.
Learn how to turn your designs into an interactive prototype that you can then sync to a free InVision account to share, get feedback, and handoff your designs to a develop to build the real thing.
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