State of Design Tools 2017

V similar to Lacroix but sold at Aldi and slightly cheaper. Dang it, it's too high. I've got something in the works that I started putting together yesterday and all of the pieces are falling in like really quickly and too easy to get this project kicked off. And I'm super duper excited about it. I literally cannot think about anything else than just pushing forward on this, this new little project that has just has got me super excited and it will be fantastic. And I'm sorry to be cryptic and even bring it up, but I'm just, I'm too excited, not to mention it, too pumped up not to give you a small little like preview into my mind. But anyway, the state of design tools coming right up. I have securely mounted my gorillapod to my dashboard. So if you're concerned about my safety. Thank you. But the camera should not be an issue. So I want to talk about the state of design tools as they exist today. January 26, 2017. I started off only Photoshop back in the early 2000s. I was making all of my web designs, all of Flash, website designs were all done in Photoshop. And I mean that was my design tool, my interface design tool for a long time. When you see other people's designs, you can almost tell that certain things are done in Photoshop vs Sketch. I'm thinking just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of like Dan Petty's work, Eddie Lobanowski's work. I know Dan uses Photoshop. I'm not sure about Eddie, but I'd be willing to bet that he uses Photoshop. And the reason for that is there's like layering of photograph elements on top of typographic elements. And that's kind of, it's kind of tricky to do in Sketch or xd. And I'm not sure about Figma. I haven't used Figma very much at all. So I can't confidently give a good opinion on that other than I don't love the idea of a web based tool. But back to Photoshop. I used Photoshop for a long, long time. I'm gonna go with 2013 or so. I was like, you know what, I can't not learn sket. And it was really difficult to change because I had over a decade of quick keys and knowledge of Photoshop. Fast forward a few years, I tried it out again and I forced myself to use it on one side project and then I forced myself to use it on a second project which was for a client. And then after three or Four projects. I started to do things more efficiently and then I realized there are some things that I can do faster in Sketch than I could in Photoshop. Photoshop is definitely more powerful, but a lot of times you don't need such a robust, powerful tool to design an interface. Sometimes you just need an interface design tool, you know, for marketing sites. I still see Photoshop as like a really good tool because sometimes it's hard to pull off the like fancy design visual tricks with Sketch. But, and you know, these are personal preferences. Some people design their entire application in Photoshop and the marketing side and some people do all of that in Sketch. You know, it doesn't really matter if you're using Photoshop or Sketch. If you have the choice, you know, just do it. Use whichever one you like. If you have other factors at play, like what's easier for developers to use on a big team? What's, you know, what's the team preference, what is the company using that you want to apply for a job there, you know, if there's other factors like that at play, then you need to learn those specific pieces of software but have that skill to be valuable as a user of that particular software to make yourself more valuable to a company or to a team to make other people's lives easier. And I also want to talk about Adobe xd, which I think think is another phenomenal tool. I've used it for two projects, two client projects and one or two kind of personal projects. And it's definitely got some Sketch like qualities. The interface, very simple boiled down to its essence and I think that's an amazing quality to have. But it's still in beta and there are some things that are just not there for me to use it full time as a UI design tool. It's not quite powerful enough to replace what I do in Sketch. It could get there and I hope it does get there because it is amazingly fast. I mean it is blistering, buttery smooth, super duper fast. And I love it. I love that about it. And the fact that you can build these interactive prototypes on the fly. It's, it's been amazing to use. There's some things that are just like for example, at the time of this recording you can't select things in multiple groups. There's just a few like small, seemingly insignificant things that don't quite work, like multi group selection that you would think wouldn't be that big of a deal. But once you, it's almost like death by a thousand cuts and it's more like maybe death by 10 or 12 cuts. Those 10 or 12 things that are not quite there make XD not quite ready for my primetime tool. But I'm very hopeful for it and I've let the XD team know. Full disclaimer. I'm on the XD Customer Advisory Board and I've let them know I've made a list of all the things that I would that are holding me back from switching to that full time design. They can't just do whatever I want, they have to be mindful of the entire community. But anyway, Photoshop, Sketch, Adobe xd, I think they're all great and I use them all at different times depending on what I need. And another tool that I want to mention is Adobe Illustrator. I've used Illustrator ever since I was in College in like 2002, 2003 when I first started using it. So I've been using illustrator for over 10 years and illustrator is just not going anywhere. It's the most powerful vector editing design tool there is. So if you want to make icons or logos, I love to use Illustrator for doing Wireframe. In fact, I love it so much that I made a full UX design course based around using Illustrator for UX design. And this is not to promote my course in way or even really promote Illustrator, but it's just about the fact that Illustrator is incredibly powerful and being able to know how to use Illustrator, how to manipulate vectors in Illustrator, it's only gonna help you be better. I don't know. I think, I think it's important that you don't get too limited with oh, should I use Sketch or should I use Photoshop or should I use Figma? Or maybe I should, you know, just use xd. And I think it's healthy to debate and throw out opinions about what software you use and why. It's always healthy to discuss preferences and opinions, but not be completely dogmatic about it when it doesn't really matter. We're really just using these as a means to an end. It's, you know, the design tool is not an end itself. It's a means to an end to accomplish some type of solution to a problem that we're working on. But leave a comment below, let me know what your favorite design tool is. All right, I gotta get out of here and get to work. Don't forget to smash that. Thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up. And subscribe below to get more of these videos.