I went to a Sketch workshop led by a School of Information alum Voratima Orawannukul on March 20, 2019. She is an award-winning Software Engineer and UX Designer. During the workshop, she introduced Sketch, which is the most popular tool used for UX design especially in the west coast companies. Sketch is a software that can help designers to quickly create prototypes for mobile/ website with a lot of pre-set templates, iOS widgets, Android Material Design widgets.
One thing that I really liked about her workshop is that she introduced an idea of Atomic Design, which encourages designers to create a design system of icons or structures before going in deep dive to design each single page. In addition, she also introduced a few add-ons to make the workflow smoother. These include Anima Toolkit PlugIn, which helps integrate styling and stacking different layers, and Craft, a plugin from Invision that can improve the prototyping functionality of Sketch. Finally, there’s another Sketch design version control management tool called Abstract, which goes along with the atomic design idea and helps to have a team of people work together on the same design without the hassle of inconsistent designs and double work on the same page.
As I am pursuing a degree in UX design, this workshop helps me to further utilize Sketch with all the potential plugins to make the workflow better. Also, learning about this would be able to help create quick digital prototypes and interactions for future website or mobile design for the Design Lab’s projects.