How We Turned Sketch Meetup Turkey into a Reality!
From user to becoming a brand ambassador.
Every artist has a set of tools. For us digital artists, softwares are our tools and we all tend to stick to the most efficient one. Quality over quantity and you know, time over anything.
Here at -99 design studio, we strive to deliver eye catching, distinctive and creative solutions to our clients. Then again, who doesn’t? For this, we’ve been mainly using Adobe products to design our work.
As you know, you can design the same interface with so many different products. Photoshop, Illustrator, even Keynote! However, the time you spend on it and the way it runs on your computer differs a great deal as you start encountering the spinning rainbow of death. After a while, some things just didn’t feel right. File sizes, conversions, the way we delivered the results to the client and how it all got transferred to the front end was a major pain. After doing some serious research, we found our gem: Sketch…💎
Let’s take a shortcut…
Sketch is a design application that runs natively on MacOS. Which means less system requirements and faster operations. Shortly after its launch in 2008, many graphic designers and agencies started switching to it.
Following the ongoing trend and shortly after integrating Sketch into our lives, we’ve realised how it was mainly built for designing user interfaces. Clean look, accessible menus, no unnecessary additions, just what you need where you need ’em. Especially with its Shared Styles and Symbols features, repetitive objects and icons are much easier to change and adjust.
A brand-new way of internal and external communications
Since Sketch files are just “.sketch”, you can’t technically send them to your front end developers or let alone the client. We started looking for tools that can be combined with Sketch to share our work. Principle and Zeplin walked hand in hand with Sketch. You could just literally copy your work to Principle and design your interactions then upload them to Zeplin where others can have a look.
Have a look at our Sketch + Principle reel and see how we managed to make them work together. 👇
At first glance, it might seem that the whole thing is a lot of trouble to go through since you know, clients will need to be included in this loop. But time is money and everyone loves money. After we walked our clients and the team through the process, everyone realised how significantly it increased our efficiency. No more massive file sizes to go through, no more exporting in many different ways to send a draft to the client and most of all, no more getting bored staring at the screen as it freezes.
Time to reach out, because sharing is caring…
So we figured out a new work flow and carried it out to our clients, as well as development team. However, it still felt like we could do more in Istanbul. There are numerous renowned designers in Turkey, each following the latest trends and do great work. Why not share what we’ve accomplished and let them improve themselves, too?
After contacting Sketch about what we’ve been up to and what we wanted to do, they decided to appoint us as their brand ambassador in Turkey and inform us about organising a possible meetup. Soon enough, we’re at SALT Galata, one of the coolest art galleries in Istanbul, with a room full of designers and creative people, sharing our story on Sketch. We went live on all social media platforms and received fantastic feedback from all the attendees.
You can find more about the event and us on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
