Book Description
If you’re designing for the web today, you are probably using Sketch. We do, too, so we created The Sketch Handbook: our brand new Smashing book, filled with many practical examples and tutorials in 12 jam-packed chapters. This book will help you master all the tricky, advanced facets of Sketch, so that you’ll become more proficient and fast when using the app.
The Sketch Handbook will guide you through every aspect of Sketch: from smart guides and layer manipulation to responsive baseline grid, nested symbols and group resizing. Whether you are a beginner to design or just started to use graphic apps, it will teach you the techniques you need to start designing user interfaces in Sketch.
What’s in it for you? Well, you’ll get a valuable overview of many different topics and techniques that are bound to make your design workflow more efficient and future-proof. You’ll learn how to design an advanced multi-screen mobile app, a responsive article and a variety of icons, for example, and dive deep into organizing the artboard, optimizing for Retina screens and exporting your assets for iOS and Android. Icon and logo design and export are also covered along the way. Finally, you’ll learn about the most recommended plugins and a number of useful tips, tricks and best practices. Everything you wanted to learn about Sketch, in one place.
Among other things, you will learn:
- How to style elements and text layers, change their properties and organize them properly,
- How to use artboards to evolve a design and iterate on ideas quickly,
- How to apply symbols and shared styles that allow you to reuse elements and keep them in sync,
- How to combine basic shapes into complex objects and optimize for maintenance,
- Advanced techniques such as dealing with masks, shadows, gradients and rotations,
- How to use an 8-pixel grid to bring more structure to designs and avoid random placement of elements,
- To work with grids and layouts and how to lay out the content in a structured, systematic way,
- How to efficiently design logos and icons in Sketch,
- How to export your assets and preview your designs on actual devices,
- How to use Sketch not only for digital design, but also for print projects,
- Tips and tricks for responsive design workflow with Sketch and adapting a mock-up from one breakpoint to another,
- How to define how elements react when they are resized with group resizing,
- The workarounds you can use when working together with developers on Windows.