Although SketchApp was created with graphic designers in mind. And one can’t argue that with its outstanding support for multiple pages and artboards and a bulk of features such as shared styles, it offers a pretty comfortable and fertile environment for creativity. However, it still requires some skills to master it. If you want to get a grasp of basics, to say nothing about making the most out of the software, then you need some documentation, guides and insights. One of the easiest and enjoyable ways of acquiring knowledge nowadays is to dive into Sketch tutorials that are composed by fellow professionals and enthusiasts in this sphere.

These online written lessons reveal a routine of creating something from scratch that can be easily repeated at home. All you have to do is to obediently follow all the instructions and at the same time memorize techniques and tricks, and practice your skills. Today’s list comprises 20 Sketch tutorials created for those of you who need some boost and directions in successfully using SketchApp. Some of them are well-suited to novices, while others require a bit more than just a simple understanding of a program.

Designing for Apple Watch: Designing a Glance in Sketch

Creator: Sven Lenaerts

Prototyping a Quotes App using Sketch and Flinto for Mac

Creator: Marcus Siegel

Sketch Workflow — Atomic Symbols

Creator: Anthony Collurafici

Exploring Dynamic Layout in Sketch

Creator: Matej Hrescak

Sketch Tutorial: Colorful Switch

Creator: Sebastien Gabriel

Pixel Density, Demystified

Creator: Peter Nowell

Sketch App Tutorial Series: Part 1 of 5.

Creator: Marc Andrew

Designing an iOS Fitness Application with Apple Watch Compatibility

Creator: Daniel Korpai

Sketch for Beginners: Design a Bold Email Newsletter

Creator: Armando Sotoca

Designing an eCommerce Portfolio: Timelapse

Creator: Adi Purdila

Free Sketch 3 Tutorials

Creator: learnsketch

Mastering the Bézier Curve in Sketch

Creator: Peter Nowell

Sketch Tricks

Creator: Peter Assentorp

How to use only rectangle,circle and line to draw illustration in Sketch

Creator: Yuki_erqiudao

5 Very Special, 10 Sketch Tips

Creator: Emin Inanc Unlu

5 Simple Steps To Perspective Mockups In Sketch

Creator: Marko Vuletic

Create a simple illustration of prescription bottle in Sketch

Creator: Abhijeet Wankhade

5 Tips to Speed Up Your Workflow in Sketch

Creator: Tatyana Kuva

Creating Patterns in Sketch

Creator: Aaron Tenbuuren

How to: Draw a seaside scene in Sketch App.

Creator: insel.design

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Do these 10 Big Brands Look Better Stripped Back?

Facebook has Redesigned its Like, Share, Follow and Save Buttons

How to Become a Faster, More Efficient Designer

See How Dreamweaver is Transforming for the Future

The 9-point Checklist for a Client-getting Portfolio Website

A Guide to Discernible Web Design

Using the Title Attribute to Help Users Predict Where They are Going

Using Code as your Primary Design Tool

Netflix’s New Logo is a Masterpiece in Symbolic Ambiguity

With Sierra, Apple Lets the Mac Be the Mac

Littleplane: Wireframing for Everyone

All the Underwater Cables that Connect the Internet

GitHub’s 2015 Transparency Report

Redesign Hacker News

The Future of Work? This Article

LinkedIn Unveils the List of Companies Where Members Want to Work Now

Site Design: Goat Story

Startup Builds AI to Automate all Your accounting

New Pen Copies the Colors Around You and Translates to Ink

Artificial Intelligence has a ‘Sea of Dudes’ Problem

PastOf.Me: Dig into your Facebook History

Facebook Turns its Back on Publishers

You People Wouldn’t Believe the Type Design in Blade Runner

Affinity Designer for Windows Beta Signup

Site Design: Transylvaniabeyond.com

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

LAST DAY: Pseudonym Font Family of 24 Subtly-Flared Serif Fonts – only $19!

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

No time to eat

That color, but not that color

Finally paying

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

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When you’re designing a digital product, whether a web application, or a mobile app, you need to bake in usability as early as possible. That’s where wireframing comes in. Wireframing allows you to envisage how your product will come together. It allows you to share your thoughts with clients, bat around ideas with colleagues. And crucially, it helps you identify UX issues before you invest time in high-fidelity mockups.

Wireframing saves tons of extra work in the long term, and the sooner you can get into it the better. That’s why we’re delighted to bring you these free versions of the Platforma wireframing kits, for web and iOS.

In the free iOS set you’ll find over 30 page layouts for iOS featuring hundreds of varied design elements to pick and choose from. In the free web set, you’ll find 4 page layouts, perfect for responsive design, that also feature dozens of unique design elements that can be copied and pasted into your own layouts.

Both the iOS, and web wireframe kits come in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch formats, so however you choose to work you can take advantage of this great freebie. Download the files beneath the previews:

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These are the ways in which I make GIFs. Sometimes for blog posts. Sometimes for tweets. Sometimes for documentation. Sometimes for fun. GIFs can be tremendously useful and communicate better than a still image or even video in some circumstances.

I use a Mac so these are mostly Mac things.

GIPHY CAPTURE

Available on the app store, GIPHY CAPTURE has an extremely easy interface. Put it over where you want to record, hit record, hit stop.

Everytime you open the app is like a session. GIFs you record will go into the bottom bar. After recording one, you click on the icon of it to open this screen:

You can upload it to GIPHY, which is useful if you need online storage for it, but you can also save it locally. You can also edit it before you upload or save it, and can:

• Trim the start/end
• Choose how it loops
• Size it to a width of 640px, 480px, or 320px (the only options)
• Add a caption

Apparently this app is an evolution of GifGrabber, and the people that adored that hate this, but that’s the internet for you.

This is my most-used GIF making app these days, but the limited options, like not being able to do much to control file size, do sometimes push me to other apps.

LICEcap

LICEcap has just a minimal user interface. It’s a transparent window you position over what you’d like to record, push Record, push Stop. You can drag the window for sizing, or set exact values.

I like how you can make them any size you want. If you need smaller or bigger, you can usually zoom the browser in or out before recording to accommodate that. The best part though is that you can set the FPS (Frames Per Second), which has an enormous impact on the file size. If you’re showing something that requires fairly smooth animation you can bump it up. If you’re showing something that instantly changes states, you can bump it down. It’s quite satisfying creating GIFs that do the job with a tiny file size, when you can.

Hot tip: you can drag the window itself even while recording.

Photoshop

Photoshop can be useful on existing GIFs, as you can open them, then Save for Web where you can resize it, and change things like color information, which all affect the file size.

But Photoshop can actually make GIFs as well. I reach for it when I have a GIF I want to make where I control each frame very specifically. For example, I might take a bunch of window screenshots of exactly the same size that are step-by-step how to do something. Then I’ll:

1. Put them into a single Photoshop file as layers
2. Open the Timeline strip and create a keyframe animation
3. Create one keyframe for each layer, in which that is the only layer turned on
4. Adjust the timing and settings
5. Save for Web

This example produced this:

Optimize

No matter which way I create the GIF, I always blast it through ImageOptim.

Makin’ GIFs is a post from CSS-Tricks

Attention web designers, Affinity fans, and basically everyone who wants to get away from Adobe: It’s here! On Windows. The Affinity Designer for Windows beta is finally out, and it is beautiful. Also, the beta version is free!

OK, so before I go into details, here’s the main highlight: It’s awesome, but a little crashy. I ran into two “exception” errors in the space of half an hour. Once when I tried to undo a bunch of things fast, and once when moving an object around after copy/pasting it.

That said, the features look great, the interface is great, the whole thing runs fast. You may not want to use it in production just yet, but I’m still looking forward to seeing the finished product.

Affinity apps are industry-grade, fast, and reasonably-priced. The fact that they’re coming to Windows isn’t just good for Windows users, it’s good for creatives all over the world. It means that newcomers to the industry, hobbyists, and even kids will have the tools to start making new stuff without resorting to piracy. (As long as they have Windows 7 or better. You can’t have everything.) That makes me excited.

When you first open it up, it won’t feel like a “Windows app”. That’s fine. This is Windows. We’re used to that. But it doesn’t really feel like a “Mac app” either. If anything, the interface feels like, “Thanks for the dark color scheme idea, Adobe, but we’d like to mix in some of our own ideas.” And they do.

It performs like a modern app that was built with focus, and without nearly thirty years of legacy code. It’s fast, it’s lean, it’s not overloaded with features that you won’t use. Every click makes something happen in a reasonable amount of time (read: instantly).

Conversely, it won’t have some of the features you might be used to from Illustrator or Fireworks. Even so, it feels like the love child of those two apps. It’s a marriage of print and web design in one interface with a strong, obvious focus on vector graphics.

You won’t find your photo filters here. But yeah, print graphics. In all the excitement over the new web-design focused features, I almost forgot it could do that. I sometimes forget that people still print things. (If there was ever a case for people like us to leave the house once in a while, that’s it.)

All in all, Affinity Designer on Windows will be a solid, dependable, pleasant-to-use product… once it stops crashing. So get in there, play with the beta, see if it’s right for you, and be sure to file some bug reports.

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When it comes to complex shapes and animations, SVG is often the format of choice, and there’s a reason for that. However, thanks to new CSS3 attributes, you get to create and even animate shapes aside from rectangle and circle, without any SVG being required at all.

Complex Shapes Via “clip-path.”

The CSS3 attribute “clip-path” allows you to crop elements to (almost) any shape you want to. For that, the basic geometrical shapes “inset()” for a rectangle, “ellipse()” and “circle()” for ellipse and circle, as well as “polygon()” for polygonal shapes are available.

When it comes to displaying a simple rectangular or circular part of an image or an HTML element, “inset()”, “ellipse()”, and “circle()” are good options. The “polygon()” function is the most interesting one, as it is used to create polygonal shapes.

div {
  clip-path: polygon(50% 0%, 65.5% 32.9%, 100% 38.2%, 75% 63.8%, 80.9% 100%, 50% 82.9%, 19.1% 100%, 25% 63.8%, 0% 38.2%, 34.5% 32.9%);
  width: 300px;
  height: 300px;
}

When using “polygon()”, as many coordinate pairs as you want to are defined and divided via comma. Not only absolute but also percentual values can be entered. This comes with the advantage that you get to set width and height using the CSS attributes “width” and “height”.

The shape defined in the example is a star. As the coordinates are defined relatively, it is easy to alter the form’s width and height.

Animating a Form Via “transition.”

The “transition” attribute or the “animation” attribute when combined with the “@keyframes” rule gives you the option to create an animated transition between two forms defined with “clip-path”.

For that, define a pseudo-class using “: is difficult to define thehover” and enter the polygon’s end stage. Here, it is important that the amount of coordinates in the source and final shape are identical.

div:hover {
  clip-path: polygon(50% 0%, 80.9% 7.2%, 97.5% 33.7%, 100% 64.6%, 79.4% 88.1%, 50% 100%, 20.6% 88.1%, 0% 64.6%, 2.5% 33.7%, 19.1% 7.2%);
}

As soon as there is too much or too little of a coordinate pair, the animated transition doesn’t work anymore. Instead, the two shapes switch without an animation.

Creating Shapes in Illustrator

It’s hard to define the coordinates yourself. Thus, it is easier and more useful to just draw the shape in Illustrator or another drawing program that knows the SVG export. If you want to enter the shape’s data as relative percent values in the “polygon()” function, the form should have a width or height of 100 pixels.

Subsequently, export the drawing as SVG and exctract the coordinates. Make sure that you actually set up a polygon. The form mustn’t contain bezier curves. A “” element should be placed in the SVG source code.

While the CSS function “polygon()” separates the coordinate pairs via comma, and the pair’s individual values via space, it is the exact opposite for the SVG format. Thus, you need to swap comma and space, and assign a percentage symbol to the values.

<polygon points="50,0 65.5,32.9 100,38.2 75,63.8 80.9,100 50,82.9 19.1,100 25,63.8 0,38.2 34.5,32.9 "/>

The example shows how the coordinates in the SVG source are displayed.

Advantages and Disadvantages of CSS Shapes Via “clip-path”

Both the CSS variant via “clip-path”, as well as the SVG options for the creation of complex forms have advantages and disadvantages. After Google announced that Chrome won’t support SVG animations via SMIL anymore, SVG shape morphing is only possible using JavaScript.

The combination of the CSS attribute “clip-path” and the “transition” attribute allow for animated form transitions without any JavaScript.

A disadvantage of “clip-path” is, that only polygons are possible, and no paths including bezier curves. This is where SVG has an advantage, as the “” element doesn’t have a problem with archs, notches, and the combination of multiple shapes.

Example on Codepen

• CSS Polygon and Animation

(dpe)

Forbes reveals in one of its articles that logos are the most important branding elements for a business. Logos don’t just create an identity for the company but also reflect its ideals, vision and culture to audience at large. Therefore, it’s important for any business, especially startups and small businesses, to invest in a logo

Hey! I don’t have a lot of links for you this week, but I feel that the ones that I selected are particularly useful to read. I learned about how to break Google captchas, the Referrer header, color psychology, and read an amazing new article by Maciej Ceg?owski whose articles and talks I value a lot. Enjoy your weekend!

WebKit finally supports improved font loading through the CSS Font Loading API, as well as WOFF 2 and unicode-range.

The post Web Development Reading List #143: The Referrer Header, Third-Party Scripts, And Color Psychology appeared first on Smashing Magazine.