I’ve been learning how to use Sketch. It”s hard when you have a visual composition in your mind, but you just can”t make real because you don’t know how to use a particular tool, so you end up depending on a third party to materialize your vision.

My struggle with design comes from long ago. I tried to use Photoshop about six years ago, but I found it too complex for my use case. I know a lot of people who use it to design prototypes but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Call me dumb, but I felt I was trying to get toothpaste with an hydraulic press. Overkill.

I also used Abode Fireworks in a distant past, and I found it to be a better fit for me, but when Adobe changed their licensing policy, I just decided to stop using it. Other failing attempts include Affinity Designer, Inkscape, and Gimp among others, but I dropped those tools mostly because I couldn’t find any good online tutorials.

When I found Sketch, I immediately fell in love with its simplicity and immediately started learning it. Fast forward a few weeks of watching video tutorials and reading online articles, and I think I’ve finally reached a level of proficiency with the tool that allow me materialize what I have in my head.

Starting the “Daily Weekly UI challenge”

They say that “practice makes perfect”. That’s the objective of the daily ui challenge. You get a daily email with a simple sentence describing a visual composition that you have to create. The nice thing is that is vage, so you have a lot of room to use your imagination.

I don’t think that I’ll be able to create a daily composition, but I’ll try my best without putting too much pressure. I’m not thinking about it as a deadline, but as something fun that I can tackle on a clear afternoon. Probably a “weekly” composition would be more realistic.

I don’t care about “Dribbble designs”

My objective with this exercise won’t be to make a “dribbble design”. That site is full of designs that look beautiful, but most of the time have bad usability, horrible readability, etc. My objective is to create compositions that are useful even if they look ugly (I’ll try my best to make them nice).

Enough words, where are the pixels?

Ok, I think I extended myself a little bit, so here is my final composition:

01. Sign up

01. Sign up