Abstract and Sketch 4 - Team Design Heaven
Kyle Bellamy
UX/HCD professional, music producer, graphic designer, photographer and gamer among other things.
For the uninitiated, Sketch (Mac only)is the go-to design app for most of the design and UX/HCD people I know. Some also use Photoshop and Illustrator but for ease of use and serious power and extensibility, Sketch has them beat hands down. Not to say the Adobe products are not products, they just are, at their core, built for other reasons and not specifically on product design.
Sketch also has a very active community creating plugins to extend Sketch to amazing capabilities. Export directly to PDF with options is one I use a lot. Also making a library out of icon fonts like FontAwesome so the glyphs are easily placed in the design.
Abstract is the answer to many prayers and agonized cries in the night for keeping design teams in sync and on top of elements. It's a GitHub like service that works for Sketch designs giving teams a centralized, versioned files they all can contribute to and note what changes were made.
Additionally, you can create libraries of symbols which basically means grouped elements for, say, a text entry form field with label then a form field drop down with label. Basically you can ensure all team members are designing with the same toolbox which greatly speeds up output and iterating. The libraries are synced with the files in the cloud as well.
Once you finish and commit your changes, you can merge your work back into the hosted files and then other users will get an update notice so they can sync their local copies to the latest version. If there is a conflict, the master version of your work is shown next to the copy on your local and you can choose which one to go with.
Additionally, Abstract allows creating collections which you add artboards that you wish to group and can then send out the link to others for review or whatever reason you need. Viewers can make notes and you get notifications of them coming in. Makes iterating really easy because as you make and commit changes, the artboards in the collection are updated to reflect them. Seriously useful feature!
In the time my team has been using this combination, we have come to rely on it in a serious way. I would say that it is a vital part of the workflow and if you are not using Abstract with your team, go demand it. Work life will be GREATLY improved!
#sketch #abstract #design #workflow