A Designer’s Guide to Scraping Data from HTML Pages with Artoo

Gathering real data for your digital designs can be a real challenge. Without access to the client’s data, we’re often on our own—reliant on bad mock data or Lorem ipsum. But don’t worry, Artoo can help solve this problem by web scraping HTML pages for you. Artoo is a neat little web scraper that will […]

Sketching Apps for iPad: Paper vs Procreate vs Affinity Designer

As a designer, I often have opportunities to sketch out ideas for clients – I might be in the wireframing stage of the design and want to get ideas on paper quickly, or I might need to create a logo or illustration. However, it can be a pain to get a paper sketch to a […]

Sketch vs. Adobe XD for Prototyping – A Designers’ Conundrum

As part of the design process, we use tools like Sketch or Adobe XD to think through our workflows, visualize wireframes, and share designs with clients and developers. We also use these tools to create clickable prototypes that can clarify component functionality and validate designs in user testing.

Intro to Lean UX Canvas – Defining a Software Solution

The Lean UX Canvas is a tool to help visualize and document your problem space, similar to the Business Model Canvas that you may know. It can be leveraged at the beginning of new software products to help align the team around the problem, come up with potential solutions, and figure out how to refine […]

Mail Merge for Documents using Google Sheets, Docs, & Scripts

Manually modifying numerous documents can be tedious. Google’s G Suite can help you make this process easier. I like to think of it as mail merge for documents. Instead of sending out custom emails to a group of recipients, we create a custom document or PDF in the same fashion.

A Simple Way To Quickly Animate SVGs with Vivus.js

Creating thoughtful, handcrafted animations is not something we get to do on our projects very often. When faced with tight deadlines and budgets, building out the core feature base has to be our top priority, so there’s not much time to devote to simply delighting users. However, animations add a lot of value. A little […]

Pivotal + Invision – Our Two-Tool Solution for Managing Design & Software Implementation

It’s not often that design is completed before implementation begins. With multiple to-do lists taking place at the same time, finding a way to keep track of everything that needs to be done is crucial to staying on top of a project. There are two great tools to help make this happen—Pivotal Tracker and InVision. […]

The Many Pros of Using Zeplin for Design Collaboration

There are countless design collaboration tools out there today. It can be overwhelming to know which ones are worth the time (and cost) investment, and which ones will turn into another item you need to maintain. I’ve recently started using Zeplin on a few of my projects, and I can confidently say it has improved […]

My Five Favorite Tools for Mobile App Design

My work as a digital designer has focused on creating digital experiences for (mostly) desktop or laptop users. When I’m designing in Sketch, what I see is really close to what I’ll see in the finished interaction. But what about designing for mobile or tablet apps? It can be easy to underestimate the size of […]

Three Tips for Winning Your Battle with Sketch Symbols

Sketch, a favorite user interface tool, added Symbol support a few years ago. Since then, I and many other designers at Atomic have heavily leveraged Symbols in our work.

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