Gravit Designer: Designing A Weather App
Being a designer at the moment is great because a wealth of modern design applications are available that let you easily bring your ideas to the screen: Sketch, Affinity Designer, Adobe XD (beta) and Figma, to name just a few (not to mention the classics, Photoshop and Illustrator). One app that is quite new, though — and perhaps a bit overlooked — is the free Gravit Designer app. Gravit gives you all of the tools needed to create functional and elegant screen designs. It can also be used to make icons, designs for print, presentations and much more.
With the recent release, it’s gotten even better: Now you can import your Sketch files into Gravit (similarly to Figma, which also supports the new Sketch file format), save designs locally or sync them to Gravit Cloud, and get started quickly with design templates. Gravit also has Symbols and improved anchoring options (also called constraints in other apps) now. Gravit Designer is free, works on all major OS platforms and is available as both a web and desktop (standalone) app.
Moving From Photoshop And Illustrator To Sketch
I’ve been a long time Photoshop and Illustrator user. Both programs are really useful and powerful, and they’ll remain a key part of any digital artist’s or designer’s toolset, including mine. However, for all user interface, web and icon design workflows, I recently converted to Sketch. Here is why. While Photoshop is awesome at what it does, defining what it is might not be so easy anymore. I remember watching a storyboarding tutorial by Massive Black’s El Coro (unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available for sale anymore). In it, he says that 17 or so years ago, Adobe had no idea that digital artists were using Photoshop to digitally paint pictures! So, it had to catch up with its own user base by adding more — you guessed it — painting features.
From Photoshop to Illustrator Design
Because using Photoshop for user interface design is, in my view, a needlessly painful experience (and I am not alone in this view), I first tried switching to Illustrator. Illustrator made things much better for me for a few reasons: Dealing with a lot of artboards is easier; I can select any object on any layer or any artboard with a single click, without ever having to hunt down layer names in the Layers panel; also, exporting assets in the latest Creative Cloud versions has been greatly improved; and so on.
Illustrator’s vector nature has a lot of advantages for designing icons and scalable interfaces, and using it I find it much easier and quicker to draw, modify and expand shapes. It can export my assets to SVG, and it gives me control over the SVG output code. Illustrator also feels more appropriate for this type of work because the paradigm of working with vector graphics is very similar to working with web technologies (containers, CSS styles, document structure, vector fonts). After all, web browsers are essentially vector-rendering engines.
Problems With Illustrator Design
However, I hit some silly problems every now and again. For example, previewing a design on a mobile device — there is simply no software that allows me to do this directly. Photoshop has Device Preview, but it’s for iOS only, and there is no such tool for Illustrator. So, I had to use a third-party tool named The Preview. And every time I wanted to device-preview a screen, I had to copy my Illustrator artboard into Photoshop, scale it up (I always work in mdpi, and my devices are xhdpi or xxhdpi), and then run The Preview on my device — which sometimes refused to work and which doesn’t support scrolling.
Also, even with the addition of CC libraries and with Illustrator’s dynamic symbols feature, some tasks remained kind of annoying or tedious, like using a large set of icons. In Illustrator, there is no simple and straightforward way to quickly add a premade icon and to quickly override its size or color (without creating a bunch of duplicates).
Specifying My Files Design
Specifying my files was a problem for me, too. It is, of course, my job to provide developers with a well-specified design. This helps to prevent questions such as “What is the distance between this element and that element?” and “What font size is this text object?”
Photoshop has a whole bunch of specification tools, but I’ve never used them. There aren’t that many for Illustrator, and all have their drawbacks. Arguably, the most feature-full is Specctr, but I had technical difficulties running it (also, it has no dp as a measuring unit). So, I ended up using a slightly modified version of the Illustrator Specify script to measure the sizes of and distances between objects for design specifications. However, as great as that script is, specifying my designs with it was still rather tedious and time-consuming.
My Deal-Breaker Design
While these problems are arguably annoying and slow down my work, they aren’t things that I couldn’t get used to and overcome. However, the two Android projects I’m currently working on are a file manager and an email client — which means that a lot of my high-fidelity mockups are full of lists, avatars, file icons, file sizes and other types of data.
To further complicate the situation, both projects come with a light and a dark UI theme. Also, a lot of my designs need to be tailored to both phones and tablets in both landscape and portrait modes. This means a lot of copying and pasting, symbol-editing, typing, selecting and deselecting, and so on.
Illustrator’s Dynamic Symbols
Admittedly, Illustrator’s symbols and libraries features can be handy and save me some manual labor. But they can be quite limited — for example, one can’t have multiple iterations of the same symbol or of the same library graphic. For me, this meant that I couldn’t use the same symbol (say, an icon or a button) in both my dark and light theme mockups because I couldn’t change its color without modifying the symbol graphic itself. The same goes for the library feature.
Problems With Data-Driven Design in Illustrator
Now, the most efficient way for me to avoid having to copy and paste is to have all text entries — see “Subject,” “From,” “Content Preview” and “Time” in the example below — as variables and to dynamically load predefined strings of data for each entry.
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