The Design Tools I Use

Foreign. I didn't make a video yesterday because I was a little bit busy. I mean, everybody's busy, so it's not really an excuse. But last week I made three videos from ePocurrence. So anyway, I feel behind. I'm really planning on getting started with design specific videos instead of just random videos of me talking to the camera. However, this is going to be another random video of me talking to the camera. I want to show you kind of what I'm working on. The software that I'm using just kind of. It's like a status update slash. I'm going to open Illustrator, I'm going to open xd, and I'm also going to open Sketch and also need to open Premiere. Okay, so let's open all these and I'm just going to open some of the projects that I'm working on. I've got this, my Monero project in Sketch. I still need to make a little animated loader for that. Haven't done it yet. Let's see, here's the app, here's all the screens. Let's go ahead and fire up Illustrator because I did all of the wireframes for my Monero inside of Illustrator instead of xd. Okay, so there's some Illustrator wireframes and then also some XD wireframes. Okay, I want to show you four different things. I'm going to show you what I'm working on in Premiere, what I'm working on in Sketch, what I'm working on in xd, and what I did work on in Illustrator. Let's just start from what I did first. Okay, so I did this, my Monero desktop app. And I'm kind of like I'm going in between Wireframing in Illustrator and Wireframing in xd. And both of them have advantages. I'm a long time Illustrator user, but XD looks very promising. However, for this desktop app, specifically for this kind of app, I wanted to show like more of like a flow and I wanted to kind of have it all laid out. So for this particular project I did, I used Illustrator because Illustrator is just much faster at drawing these lines. And, you know, not worrying about art boards. I never really use art boards in Illustrator beyond like just using like a giant art board to export one big PDF. You know, I wanted to show. Okay, you can tap this button and it goes to this screen. Go on there. Send button here, it goes over here and I can make little notes like if address doesn't exist as contact, all the little tiny, like details of the of each like small interaction in all the different states. Sometimes I find it easier to do that in Illustrator and just put everything out. It's all like kind of a big bird's eye view. And you don't necessarily have to build a prototype. So anyway, this is what Illustrator is really good for. Just banging out a bunch of wireframes and drawing lines and kind of making flow charts and user flows and things like that. It's almost like a big digital whiteboard. That's how I use Illustrator and I think it's still really good for that. And it's even gotten better with Illustrator 2017. I don't know. I still use it a lot for different projects every time I've designed wireframes in Illustrator. Very rarely. Hang on, my wife's calling me. Hey. Hey, what you doing? I am recording a video. All right. Can't ignore the wife's phone call. Okay, where was I? Very rarely do I go from Illustrator wireframing to directly to doing UI in Illustrator. In this case, I went straight from Illustrator. You can see I've got like, I've got a content map, I've got first time user experience flow, I've got the wallet flow, I've got the send and receive flows, I've got contacts. So I started off in one file, split them up into multiple files. That's typically how projects go. Like you start, you don't know exactly what you're going to have and then you break them up into different pieces just depending on the project. There's no specific reason other than the file sizes are start to get a little bit more difficult to deal with. And sometimes you just want to open up a small specific feature instead of the entire thing. And then from Monero Wireframes, I went into Sketch and just started going to town on all of the screens. There's a lot of screens that I did not wireframe that I didn't think of until later. I'm in constant communication with the developer. Sketch is really powerful at putting, you know, using these, these symbols in here. So I can change this Money to say 20.075 monero and you know, and I can get in here and move this over and go return to instance. And then everywhere that's using that same symbol is going to be, you know, shifted. So like all these different art boards that are using that symbol is going to be updated. And that's one of the reasons why I really love Sketch. Another program that I'm using pretty regularly is xd. If you just want to see something quick, it's easy to put it together and then I can share this link right out of the gate, just hit new link and just send it to the client or the people that you're working with, just to give quick ideas. And sometimes you don't need to do big, long user flows. What would be really cool is if XD could export these big flows into a strategic map just so you could see everything. But I'm kind of torn as to how helpful that is. You know, I'm wondering if it's just a bias that I'm carrying from old projects where it's just nice to look at everything in one flow, because really, at the end of the day, no one's looking at a big flow. It's really just about the experience. And there's one screen, there's one view, and typically a user is going to navigate through there. So it may be easier in the long run to just use XD or sketch with InVision, if you're more comfortable with that. One really powerful thing with XD right now is that you can just create this right in the program and then export it to the web immediately. You know, Craft is getting there with InVision and Sketch, but it's not quite there yet. And so all of these are like, on the brink of being, like the perfect tool. But until then, I'm probably going to be using everything, all the different tools. And then one last thing, just to give you a little more full, rounded picture, I've got this icon course. So if you look in here in Premiere, you can see, unfortunately, this is before I got my beautiful, like, Halo light that makes me look a little bit like a ghost. Maybe I should go lay in the tanning bed or something, I don't know. But it's better than. It's better than this. But you can see I've got Module one, introduction. Welcome icons and apps, setup, grids, blah, blah, blah. So it's kind of like. It's also my first practice course where I'm like, I'm doing screen flow and like with the good camera and trying to chop it up. So you can see here, I'll just play this for you real quick, just to give you an idea. Can be quite helpful to have these grid lines in place and it's very simple to do so with our document Open will quickly open the preferences panel and then you can click Guys and grids. Now I've got my. So I'm trying to go back and forth between this shot and the screenshot. Kind of like this video as well. I've got three modules for this course module, one introduction, I've got all these different icons. And then in the third module I have. I have. I'm working in Sketch, working in xd, working in Illustrator, and working in Premiere, doing lots of video editing. And I've also got another update on my secret project. Just to reveal a tiny bit more about that. I've got nine designers, including myself, that are going to collaborate on something really amazing. And that's all I'm going to say for now. I'm going to let you just marinate on that for a little bit. I'm also thinking about doing some giveaways with the AIUX course and possibly like opening registration for that to the public. You know, let me know if you want to hear more about that. But yeah, so Sketch, xd, Illustrator, Premiere, Freelancing. But let me know what you want to see more of. Let me know in the comments below. Don't forget to smash the thumbs up on this video. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. And maybe check out one of these. If you haven't done it already, check out these two epocurrence videos from last week. It was an epic occurrence indeed. Make sure you check these out. YouTube gives me 20 seconds to have these here. So.