Design Trouble

I’ve been fighting with the design of this interface over the last few days. The process has become incredibly complex with designing interface elements in Flash, spitting out png’s and then re-assembling in Sketch. Why do this? Well, Sketch has “artboards” or canvases as I call them – most applications only allow one artboard or canvas at a time but with Sketch you can have as many as you want. With Sketch, you can mockup all of your different design states on different artboards. This is huge and allows you to see the flow of interactions purely by looking at your rows of artboards. It has a very similar feel to storyboarding.

The downside is that Sketch has a long way to go before it becomes a full-on design tool. There are just too many quirks and things that should be really easy (like slicing a rounded corner rectangle in half) are not easy, or nigh on impossible. For this reason, I’m drawing in Flash, spitting out png’s and assembling in Sketch. So, for the moment, it’s complicated and tedious.

*Update – I’m now just mocking up screens in Flash, taking screenshots & then assembling these screenshots in Sketch. Which is much easier.