My first challenge with Sketch: a low cost travel app

Once you’ve explored a little bit the interface of a new tool, it is necessary to get your hands dirty with some easy, but challenging tasks. This is the only way to really understand how a software works and learn and integrate the commands to move confidently through it.

I had already done my homework with Sketch, that is, reading some basic articles, watching some tutorials and practising with very simple shapes (if you want to see my very first attempt, click here). Now, it was time to try with a more difficult task. I wanted to design two screens of a low cost travel app: the log in screen and the itinerary screen. To be honest, I was copying a model, but that was hard enough for me as a beginner :-) Let’s let the ideas flow in a future activity!

This is the result of a couple of hours of work:

Thanks to this activity I have remembered the majority of short cuts from the tutorials and I think I have assimilated them. The most difficult part for me has been the use of the mask tool. This got me stuck at the beginning of the activity for a long half an hour. The second time I had to use it (for the profile pictures)It didn’t take so long, but I need still some practice to control it. I also had problems with the logo on the left screen, as I designed it using the boolean tools, and I found difficult to keep the oval in white instead of in the background color. As you can probably guess I had to use my own tools to solve this problem :)

Trying this challenge has been a wonderful way to put in practice all my new skills and increase my confidence with the tool. However, for me, the most important is the fact that Sketch is so intuitive that it allows you to solve the problems by finding the tool or feature easily through the interface. As an example of this I had problems with the background because every time I wanted to move an object over it, I accidentally moved the background in place. First, remember that Command+Z to undo the action is a great tool. Second, if you go to the layer panel you will find a “lock layer” option when clicking on the layer. Easy peasy…!