I am sure most of the senior web designers will agree to the fact that sketches are an important part of the design and development process. Sketches not only convey ideas, but also demonstrate functionality, illustrate things that require human interaction, and help to visualize user flow. Did you ever start any design directly in Photoshop without any planning? Well! You must have realized a terrible user experience? No wonder, those who do not understand the value of sketching in designing, go through the blog post and realize its significance.
8 Tips for Planning Your Web Design with Sketches
Why sketch before designing process?
Vector graphics
Everything you create in sketch is a vector element. This help you to scale them without worrying about pixilation. This feature is particularly helpful when you’re working with SVG, or exporting assets for @2x displays. In fact, this digital design tool is vector based and helpful for responsive design.
Provide the basic layout and composition
Sketches are a quick way to create the basic composition of an illustration. They even evaluate the layout choices and help to capture the necessary elements. In fact, the author of ‘The Complete No-Nonsense Guide to Designing Websites, say, quick sketches help him quickly record the likeness of what he had visualized in his head. This way of working is a lot more efficient than starting directly in Photoshop.
Smart guides and grid
Grid help to line up the design elements and get consistent spacing. In sketch, it is easier to set up custom grid line. And customizing grid setting in sketch is easy. Similarly, sketch’s smart guides help to make alignment objects effortless. They tell you when an object lines up with another.
Accurate font
Often you’ll discover that fonts look completely different when you design an amazing interface in Photoshop and port it over to CSS/HTML. Typography is key to user experience, and therefore, a correct representation in the webs design is important in the designing process. Similarly, with sketch, you’ll find font-rendering is very close to how it would be on a website. This means you can quickly know how everything will look together without having to mend together a high-profile prototype. Visual exploration and refinement
Sketching can be used as an activity to record and explore different interests. In addition, it can also be used to explore multiple other options that could be a part of the design. Visual exploration can include sketches of portfolios, the design pattern, logos, identities and style. Besides, sketching makes the process of illustration refinement easy. When any particular element seems missing in the design, this can be corrected in further rounds of design and then it moves to the digital drafts.
Sketch mirror
When designing new site, you of course want it to look great on mobile. You can actually implement the trick for testing designs in different viewport sizes such as using Chrome extension to resize viewport to match Nexus or iPhone or manually resizing the browser window. However, sketch has a special app for responsive design testing – Sketch mirror. The app is great for testing design on a series of devices all at the same time.
Steps to complete your sketch successfully
Objective and Research
Get a clear understanding of the business objective and how you will accomplish it. Before you start sketching, research is imperative. It is where the initial ideas begin to build, so that you can envision what you’re trying to design. Sketching helps you to extract numerous ideas before you enter into a graphics editor to start designing the look and feel.
Sketching
Sketching is an integral step in the design process that help to explore and explain design concept. With a pen and paper, your sketch idea can be fast and rough. This helps you to worry less on the design aesthetic and focus more on idea formulation.
Wireframes
Sketches and wireframes are not same. Wireframes are the refined version of the ideas formed during the sketching process and point out the finer details of a user interface. Sketching comes before the wireframe stage.
Sketching is an excellent way to explore concepts. As an essential step in designing process, sketching saves your time to work through concepts on paper before going to the computer. Sketching helps discover potential issues and solutions early, prior to starting the design and development stages. Sketching is the best idea to start a design. It is a powerful process to help discover multiple ideas and solutions to a design problem. Design was and rather is an important step in the design and development process.