Paul Martens

Paul Martens

Director of UX UI Joined over 9 years ago

  • 1 story
  • 11 comments
  • 7 upvotes
  • Posted to Android & Apple 3X Ratio Calculator Numbers Spreadsheet., Sep 24, 2014

    My apologies...it's been updated:

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/wwtyitjxrkuwz77/Pixel%20Ratios.zip?dl=0

    0 points
  • Posted to Stop trashing clients on DN. Educate instead., in reply to Jonathan Cutrell , Jul 21, 2014

    I'm relatively new to DN...If the tone towards clients is considerably more negative than positive, I might end up aligning with your original post more as time goes on!

    On the whole I feel lucky to be with the clients we have. I'd say 85-90% of them I'm happy working with.

    I thought the invite-only nature of DN kept non-designers out of the forums...!

    0 points
  • Posted to What tools/platforms do you use to pass your work to the developers/rest of the team?, Jul 21, 2014

    Thanks for posting this...I'm looking to change what we do for the developers myself. We have a network drive that I keep a project specific assets folder.

    0 points
  • Posted to Matter: An expanding UI Kit for Sketch, Jul 21, 2014

    Honestly, handcrafting this on your own for $19? My billable time is considerably more so...it makes sense for me to buy it. Also, this is probably the most reasonably priced UI Kit I've seen. If you work at an agency type outfit, this seems like a good resource to have.

    2 points
  • Posted to Keynote does Material Design, Jul 21, 2014

    I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who sees this sort of value in Keynote (before Magic Move I relied more heavily on Apple's Motion). QC, Origami, Framer, Pixate, Hype, even Apple Motion...these still seem great and helpful, but my familiarity with Keynote (bought it for $99 the first month it was out like---10 years ago) seems to hinder my adoption of these newer prototyping apps. Not to say I don't like some new tools -- Sketch 3 with symbols and Flinto are really helpful...and then using Keynote to export some animations to quicktime, then running that through GIF rocket and placing it selectively in Flinto? It's pretty straight forward and easy to update.

    Now if only Apple would allow presentation of Keynote files at a 90˚ angle...that would solve a lot of mobile prototyping problems for me.

    0 points
  • Posted to Stop trashing clients on DN. Educate instead., Jul 18, 2014

    Odd 'rule'. Don't trash clients on DN, but judge the Designers on DN that do?

    People are free to vent...personally (with one client in particular) had someone vented about them to me beforehand, I would have approached them completely different saving our company 10s of thousands of dollars. Actually, maybe even 100K or so. Not kidding.

    I have great clients too, don't get me wrong...but it's important to warn people....and wouldn't this forum be a great place to do it? Yes, some people go to an extreme, but can we fight black and white thinking with a different kind of black and white thinking?

    If one is too sensitive to not be able to contain other's conflict or stress (and designers are sensitive!) I get it...I have my limits as well. But let's not be pedantic or admonish others to take the high road: we are all human, on the same road. Sometimes being a designer sucks, sometimes it's awesome?

    0 points
  • Posted to Sketch 3 should be 0.3, Jul 18, 2014

    Hello,

    I have found more annoying bugs in 3.04 than 3.03 (Scrolling when grouping on the layer view is tough to deal with). Having said that (and I'm echoing others here)...if your files are 700mb, I'm not sure you are using Sketch correctly. This is a vector tool...you want your files to be as light as possible because you want your designs to be as much vector as possible.

    One of my larger files (50 mb) has 54 screens. Constantly exporting all screens at once to a dropbox folder (automatically updating my flinto proto). It never crashes....and I'm on Yosemite Beta 3.

    16 GB of RAM probably doesn't hurt, but I'm on a mid 2012 retina laptop pushing to a 27" Apple Thunderbolt display.

    0 points
  • Posted to Erik Spiekermann about iOS' thin typeface, Jun 30, 2014

    I agree with a lot of what's said in this video unfortunately.

    If any of you played with the original betas when iOS 7 first came out you 100% see where Spiekermann is coming from. In particular...did any of you remember the Newsstand App? I won't post screenshots...but lets just say the look was entirely too delicate. I showed quite a few people the app and asked them if they saw any text. Most could not read the 'Newsstand' in a very light gray tone.

    0 points
  • Posted to ASK DN: What do you think about using Material Design on iOS?, Jun 26, 2014

    You don't 'know' it is a very good visual language until you've tested this with your users. Bring to the table different approaches to a palette/detail/IX and see what your users prefer.

    16 points
  • Posted to Is Sketch used much in web design studios?, Jun 09, 2014

    It entirely depends on what kind of firm you would like to be employed with I would imagine. Photoshop (and Illustrator) still are industry standard, but the more cutting edge firms seem to be accepting Sketch as a legitimate design tool and incorporate it in their work flow. Since vector design is more crisp and is often preferred by designers, I would imagine over time Sketch will become more readily adopted. Assets are assets btw.

    Over the next year I'm hoping to create a workflow, then transition my team of 6 to Sketch simply because of the time saving export features and how the app handles symbols.

    Sketch's ease of use and low learning curve makes it a great tool for UI professionals. If you master it (that does not take much time) and it's on your CV, you'll still have time to understand photoshop.

    1 point
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