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Prototype Design: Atomic.io, the underrated prototyping tool
What a time to be a designer whatever you are in the field of UI/UX, Interaction Design, Product Design or a Graphic Designer in transition. There are many incredible design tools out there and we are lucky to have such a variety to get things done or to integrate into our workflow. But now the thing is, which one is the right tool or the ultimate tool for my personal work? Your studio? Your organization? To be honest, there aren't any right or wrong answers. It all depends on what are the needs and what are the things you wanna accomplish. On my recent experience, I was asked to integrate Atomic.io into my design process as an experiment. I was surprisingly amazed by how it has changed since my last use of Atomic which was probably about two years ago. I will share with you the things that I liked and what I disliked, so here goes. Disclaimer: That is NOT a sponsored post, my opinion and feedback shared in this article are explicitly based on my own user experience. Thank you for reading! More Links Try Atomic From the Atomic Team Learn Atomic What the interface looks like What is Atomic.io Atomic is a prototyping tool that puts advanced interactive design features like logic, data, and variables. The first win for me is the fact that Atomic is browser-based, you can have the freedom to either prototype designs whenever you are on a Mac or PC. I am personally a Mac user (for Sketch) but some companies/startups out there are building their development structure in relation to PCs. On Atomic, you will be able as features: Basically design from scratch in Atomic or you can import your design Add interactions like gestures, user inputs, events and keyboard interactions. Learn Atomic through ultra-quick tutorials that teach you everything from the basics right through to advanced features. Animate your prototypes using One-click page transitions or finely controlled keyframe animations. Build reusable interactive components help you quickly scale designs while maintaining consistency. Introducing external data sources to create dynamic, realistic interaction designs. Create logic to handle complex, personalized user journeys. Share components, data, templates and more with your team via Atomic’s built-in libraries. Share links, provide feedback, design simultaneously. Access your designs anywhere through the Cloud UI Interface Since I haven't played with Atomic in years, it was almost like a new experience. At first glance, there is a hint of Sketch in Dark Mode but you have your toolbar on the left side instead of on the top. In Atomic, at the top, you will have what I called: Create Toolbar. You will be able to create a component, a mask, introduce a scroll and group your elements/layers. On the right side, you will have your alignment options, layout options, and appearance options. What's different though are the sections: Image (Inheritance), Actions (for your hotspots) and CSS (custom or export). Understanding Component vs Interaction Hotspot I would be honest, it took me a little bit of time to understand the intent of making a component and creating your interaction hotspot. It's very different but once you understand their properties, everything else goes pretty smoothly. You have to understand that if you wanna create an interactive component or shall we say a UI element. You will have to define its different state first because placing it into your prototype to make an interactive hotspot. It's a bit tricky at the beginning but totally right after your first try. What's good? Well as I mentioned before, I just like the fact that you are working within the browser. It's pretty fast and one thing that worked pretty well for me was the integration with Sketch. Yes! You can work on your low-fi and hi-fi prototypes in Sketch and simply sync it to Atomic. I can hear some designers mentioning the fact there are already those functions on Sketch, let's say we are doing different experiments with our process. If you wanna learn more about the Atomic Sketch plugin. Tip: before you sync your artboard to Atomic, make sure your settings are fixed with the project (on Atomic). Aside from the tool itself, I would say I love the community support around Atomic, you can supercharge your workflow with prototyping samples, resources, UI kits, navigation samples, tutorials and more. I would like to share a story where I had an issue during prototyping and I contacted Atomic for help. What's a game-changer is the functionality to collaborate and share links between us and the experts. Imagine sending a link from my prototype and one of their experts replied a new link with an updated functioning prototype with a tutorial on how to reproduce. It wasn't a company who sent them that email, it was an individual (me) asking for help. To me, that's awesome and one of the reasons why I am writing this article. Furthermore, this tool is completely free with full access to their features, unlimited prototypes, unlimited projects, and no usage limits. *Drop the mic What's bad? I wish the design tool feature was a little bit more robust like Figma for example so whenever you wanna design straight into Atomic, it feels more intuitive. I haven't played long enough with Atomic but I had this feeling during my participation. I wanted to experiment without thinking that I could do the "same thing" on Sketch or at the least it feels like a vector tool for example. Conclusion We can go more in-depth Atomic for our next article, maybe a tutorial? Let us know of your thoughts, do you use Atomic? What was your experience and do you still use it? What are your design tools that you use every day? You can tweet me @AoiroStudio. More Links Try Atomic From the Atomic Team Learn Atomic
Framer Prototypes for Mobile Navigation
It's amazing how prototyping has become one of the hottest skill-sets in the toolbelt of any designer. We went from pretty much zero to a plethora of applications that help us to prototype our designs. I attribute this to the mobile revolution, nowadays it's vital to be able to test your designs on the device. There are so many details that get lost in translation otherwise. Among the most popular tools Framer ranks at the top for many. Yes Lee shares some amazing examples of navigation style design that illustrate that quite well. Below you'll find some examples of the design and the prototype shared on Behance. Make sure to click on the images to see the Framer prototype as well. Yes lee is a Senior Designer and Seoul, South Korea. For more information check out his https://www.behance.net/yesl1121.
Basic Animations in CSS and Javascript for Prototypes
Motion design is getting more important everyday when it comes to design interfaces that engage with the user both functionally and emotionally. Because of this, I started practicing with Javascript and jQuery to create basic animations for my prototypes. One of the most common animations comes into play when you want to build a list or animate items in a chain. To illustrate that today I share a simple technique I use for my prototypes. For this little tutorial we will play with some HTML, CSS and Javascript. The whole process won't take more than 30 minutes. Step 1 Start a new HTML document and add some elements, one "Section" and then a list "UL" with a few objects "LI" <!doctype html> <html> <head> <title></title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0"> </head> <body> <section> <ul> <li>1</li> <li>2</li> <li>3</li> <li>4</li> <li>6</li> <li>7</li> <li>8</li> </ul> </section> </body> </html> Step 2 Now lets import jQuery and jQuery Transit plugin to help us animate the list. <!doctype html> <html> <head> <title></title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0"> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.1.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-migrate-1.2.1.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ricostacruz.com/jquery.transit/jquery.transit.min.js" ></script> <style> body{ padding: 0; margin: 0; background: #000; } section{ max-width: 1024px; min-height: 960px; background: url(http://wpuploads.appadvice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/24.png) center center; background-size: cover; margin: 0 auto; } ul, ul li{ margin:0; padding: 0; list-style-type: none; } ul { padding-top: 40px; } ul li{ background: #fff; margin: 0 11px 1px 11px; padding: 15px; } </style> </head> <body> <section> <ul> <li>1</li> <li>2</li> <li>3</li> <li>4</li> <li>6</li> <li>7</li> <li>8</li> </ul> </section> </body> </html> Step 3 - Animating the list To animate the list is pretty simple, the first and most important thing to do is to have a little script of what you want to animate. In this first case we will animate one LI at the time fading in and sliding down from the top. <script> $(function(){ $("ul li").each(function(i){ $(this).css({y:"-30px", opacity:0}).transition({y:"0", opacity:1, delay:200 * i},600,"ease"); }) }) </script> So what we are doing in that function is to find each "LI"strong> and then for each one we will set with CSS to move them "-30px"strong> in the Y axis (top) and change the opacity to 0. After that with jQuery Transition we will move it back to the original position. To make sure each one move at different time we will set a delay to 200 and multiply that by "i" (each element have their unique "i"). Step 4 - some 3D rotations <script> $(function(){ $("ul li").css({opacity:0}).each(function(i){ $(this).css({y:"150px", rotateX: "90deg", transformOrigin: 'center top'}).transition({perspective: '400px',y:"0", opacity:1, rotateX:"0deg", delay:200 * i},300, "ease"); }) }) </script> The only thing we added here was the rotateX and transformOrigin for the CSS and perspective and rotateX for the transition. You can play with these values to change the animation as well. Conclusion Below you can see a basic example of what you can do with simple Javascript. The best thing about these animations is that they use the GPU, that means they run very smooth in mobile devices and are perfect for mobile prototypes. See the Pen uqnjH by Fabio Sasso (@abduzeedo) on CodePen
Basiliq - Freehand UI Kit
Designing interfaces and products is all about iterations and testing. Wireframing is a very important part of the process, it's about testing ideas very quickly and ideate. The last thing you should think about is the look and feel, but of course you don't want something terrible to show, especially when collaborating with other designers or clients. Basiliq - Freehand UI Kit provides a great solution for this problem. With over 300 beautiful crafted UI elements ready for your prototypes. Everyone loves high quality icons. Even user interface designer, who work with sketches and wireframes. The problem is that popular prototyping tools produce mockups that don't look so great. That's why we've created over a three hundred design elements specifically for prototyping. A hand-crafted set of icons for mockups. Customize 300 (maybe even more) little bits and pieces and bells and whistles. You can assemble anything from them. From the mobile YouTube UI to a model WWII tank. We've double checked to make sure you're covered. Current version is incompatible with assembling several abyssal fish spieces and Higgs boson. We're working hard to fix it in next release, thank you for your patience. Download Download the pack
Introduction to Mobile Prototyping with HTML, CSS and JavaScript
If you are a designer in this day and age you are probably designing for handheld devices like smartphones and tablets. We live in a polarizing world where on one side we have native apps and on the other the web, with responsive sites and web apps. Designing in this environment requires understanding of the context you will be designing for, therefore, testing on devices. There are several ways to create prototypes, from paper to motion in After Effects. For me, basic HTML, CSS3 and JavaScript do the best job because they allow me to test on the phone with an incredible level of accuracy. In this post I will start sharing some tips on how to create basic HTML/CSS3/JS prototypes. The idea is to enable you to test your designs on phones, tablets or web. I will also assume that you know a little bit of HTML and CSS, but of course you can learn that online or doing the reverse engineer. So in this first post I will show you how to create a simple prototype with a few icons and basic transitions. You can then apply to your own designs. The coolest thing is that you can create a super smooth prototype with this simple technique. Introduction The first thing is to start an HTML document and make sure you have the structure done. For prototypes, the simplest way to create them is by having all screens you want to test in the same file, that way there won't be any lagging between screens. Remember, we are creating a prototype, not a web app. The way I organized my HTML is that every screen will use a "DIV" tag with an "ID" and a "CLASS='SC". That way I can use CSS to make them work the same way. For each screen I used the "HEADER" tag to create the header of the screen. Below is the full HTML file of the prototype. Prototype Back Screen 1 Back Screen 2 Back Screen 3 Back Screen 4 Back Screen 5 Back Screen 6 Back Screen 7 Step 2 For the icons, notice that I created a list using "UL" and "LI". Also notice that there are other classes like "LINK", "NONE", "slideup", "slideleft" and more. I will cover those in a few, but for now let's focus on the design of the screens and the icons. The first line you can see that I am reseting the CSS, that's an easy way to clear all properties and styles that browsers have. I am using the Eric Meyer's CSS Reset. You can find it at http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ For the screens, this is the CSS: @import "reset.css"; html, body{ width: 100%; height: 100%; } body{ padding: 0; margin: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: relative; } .sc{ width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute; display: none; z-index: 10; } .sc.selected{ display: block; z-index: 11; } Icons For the icons, we will use a basic "display:inline-block". We could have used the new and fancy flex model, however it doesn't work in Safari, so for now let's wait till iOS7. #home ul{ width: 100%; height: 100%; text-align: left; } #home ul li{ height: 72px; width: 72px; background: #fff; display: inline-block; margin: 22px 0 0 22px; border-radius: 6px;; } Screens Each screen will have a different color background. Below you can see the CSS. #home{ background: #333; } #screen1{ background: #2C3E50; } #screen2{ background: #E74C3C; } #screen3{ background: #3498DB; } #screen4{ background: #ECF0F1; } #screen5{ background: #2C3E50; } #screen6{ background: #E74C3C; } #screen7{ background: #3498DB; } jQuery Now it's time for the most important part, how to make things work. How to make the links open a different screen. To do that we will use Javascript with jQuery. We will use jQuery because it's easier for beginners to understand how Javascript work. To use jQuery we will have to make sure we are loading it in our HTML. To do that, use this code withing your "HEAD" tag. We are basically loading jQuery from its servers. Removing the 300ms lag Every time you click/tap something using a mobile phone, there will be a 300ms second if you use regular Javascript events like "onclick". To get rid of that there are some plugins online. The one we will use is based on Google Fast Button, but it's a jQuery version. You can read more about it at https://github.com/alexblack/google-fastbutton Download the ZIP file and copy the .js files to the folder of your HTML file. Then add these lines right after the previous "script" tags that you used load jQuery. Animations CSS animations are the best way to create silk smooth animations for mobile prototypes. You can create animations using the keyframe technique, however there's an amazing jQuery plugin that helps. The plugin is the jQuery Transit - CSS3 transitions and transformations by Ricard Cruz http://ricostacruz.com/. Same thing as before, let's load the plugin. Just add the code like the example below. Basic transition For the basic transition, that's hiding the current screen and showing the new one we will use CSS classes. Notice that theres a ".sc" and a ".sc.selected". For the basic ".sc" we have a "display:none", that means all screens will be hidden. Then for the one selected ".sc.selected" there's a "display:block". So basically, the idea is, the screen that's visible, it will have a class "selected". By removing the class and adding to another screen, we make a simple transition. Below you can see the code. $(document).ready(function() { $(".link").fastClick(function () { screen = "#" + $(this).attr("page-load"); if($(this).hasClass("none")){ $(".sc").removeClass("selected"); $(screen).addClass("selected"); } }) }) The code above is basically, when the user clicks on a tag with the class ".link" it will get the screen to show, that is in the "page-load" from the link. We will create a variable called "screen" to have this value, but we will add the "#" symbol, that is the one used to represent the "ID". If the link has a class "none" that is for different animations, we will basically remove the class "selected" to all ".sc" tags. Then we will add the class "selected" to the one we want to show. Slide from Right to Left To create a simple slide transition, we will pretty much follow the same idea, the only difference is that we will position the screen to load off the current viewport and then animate it in. Below you can see the code. if($(this).hasClass("slideleft")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).css({x:$(window).width() + "px"}).addClass("selected"); $(".previous").transition({x:"-" + $(window).width() + "px"},300,"ease"); $(screen).transition({x:"0px"},300,"ease",function () { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style"); }); } So the code below will first add a class "previous" to the current screen, that's already selected. Then it will position the screen to show off the screen using "$(screen).css({x:$(window).width() + "px"})" that means, the screen will be position in the width of the window "$(window).width()" to get the value and move it in the X axis to that point. Example, if your screen is an iPhone, it will move the new screen at 640px. Then the class "selected" will be added in order to make it visible. At this point you will have 2 screens with the class "selected". The second part is the animation using jQuery Transit. So we will basically animate the screen that was on the right to the 0 position using "$(screen).transition({x:"0px"},300,"ease",function ()". The time of the animation will be 300ms and it will use "ease" to make the speed not linear. Once the animation ends, we call a function to remove the "selected" class from the "previous" tag. Then we remove the "previous" class too. At last we remove any "style" attribute to make sure that there won't be any issue in the other animations. More Animations Below you can see different transtions type. We have SlideUp, SlideDown, SlideLeft, SlideRight, BackDown, Backup. if($(this).hasClass("slideup")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).css({y:$(window).height() + "px"}).addClass("selected"); $(screen).transition({y:"0px"},300,"ease",function() { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style"); }); } if($(this).hasClass("slidedown")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).addClass("selected"); $(screen).css({y:"-" + $(window).height() + "px"}); $(screen).transition({y:"0px"},300,"ease",function() { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style"); }); } if($(this).hasClass("slideleft")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).css({x:$(window).width() + "px"}).addClass("selected"); $(".previous").transition({x:"-" + $(window).width() + "px"},300,"ease"); $(screen).transition({x:"0px"},300,"ease",function () { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style"); }); } if($(this).hasClass("slideright")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).css({x:"-" + $(window).width() + "px"}).addClass("selected"); $(".previous").transition({x:$(window).width() + "px"},300,"ease"); $(screen).transition({x:"0px"},300,"ease",function () { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style"); }); } if($(this).hasClass("backdown")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).show(); $(".previous").css("z-index","24").transition({y:$(window).height() + "px"},300,"ease",function() { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(screen).addClass("selected"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style") }); } if($(this).hasClass("backup")){ $(".selected").addClass("previous"); $(screen).show(); $(".previous").css("z-index","24").transition({y: "-" + $(window).height() + "px"},300,"ease",function() { $(".previous").removeClass("selected"); $(".previous").removeClass("previous"); $(screen).addClass("selected"); $(".sc").removeAttr("style"); }); } Using the animations With this basic code you can simply add a class "link" to any tag to make it clickable. Once it's clickable you can choose the transition by using another tag. In our case you can use: slideup - eg. slidedown - eg. slideleft - eg. slideright - eg. backdown - eg. backup - eg. Conclusion It might look confusing, but as any new thing we want to know there's a learning curve. The secret is to go little by little, with small little achievements in order to get easy and quick rewards, that way we keep ourselves motivated. Below you can see the code working on an iframe. You can also download the files and check on your phone (recommended) Download Files Demo on Phone Prototyping tools and Frameworks http://www.framerjs.com/ http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/index.html https://github.com/donnfelker/android-bootstrap
Framer - Prototyping tool for desktop and mobile
Prototyping is a vital part in designing great products, from a simple poster to a car, it's extremely important to test designs in situations that resemble the real usage environment. My background is in Industrial Design and we used to prototype everything. Then I moved to graphic design and again I was always printing and checking to see how my designs felt. Now in the digital world, and with mobile taking over it's really important to be able to simulate the products in the handsets. There are quite a few frameworks out there but I would like to share one called Framer. Frame can help you to quickly build interactions and animations. Built for designers and integrates with Photoshop. Great alternative to Quartz Composer, Flash or Keynote. I started using it a few days ago, recommended by Noah Levin, a fellow Googler and the amazing designer behind the Google App for iOS with Google Now.? Framer is a prototyping tool for animation and interaction on desktop and mobile. Features Photoshop: Framer integrated with Photoshop to quickly export assets and set up a project. Animation: Animate any view in full 3D space with spring physics and bezier curves. Performance: Hardware accelerated for high frame rates. Based on CSS keyframes. Flexible: Works well for desktop, mobile and tablets. Plays well with the rest of the browser. Video preview Framer Photoshop from Koen Bok on Vimeo. For more information, to check out some demos visit http://www.framerjs.com/
Responsive Nav - Useful Responsive navigation plugin
What I love the most about the open source community and living in today's ever-evolving world is the abundance of great work being shared. It's pretty hard to not find what you're looking for, particularly within the world of programming, if you are just starting out. I draw a lot of my learnings and inspiration for prototypes and fully baked products within this resourceful community. Today I want to share with you a plugin for responsive navigation called Responsive Nav Responsive navigation plugin without library dependencies and with fast touch screen support. Try it out by resizing this window. Features Responsive Nav is a tiny JavaScript plugin which weighs only 1.6 KB minified and Gzip’ed, and helps you to create a toggled navigation for small screens. It uses touch events and CSS3 transitions for the best possible performance. It also contains a “clever” workaround that makes it possible to transition from height: 0 to height: auto, which isn’t normally possible with CSS3 transitions. For more information visit http://responsive-nav.com/
Flipping Book in CSS and jQuery
The tutorial of this week is about HTML, CSS and a little bit of Javascript with jQuery. As the rule of trend now is mobile first and any designer who wants to really understand the media will have to be able to create quick prototypes of his/her work, we decide d to write a few basic prototyping tutorials. The first one will be about create a simple flipping book, like a 3 fold brochure, using HTML, CSS and JS for the events. For this tutorial you will have to have some knowledge of HTML and CSS. You can also just copy and paste and change the values to see how it works. I am still learning and improving my CSS and jQuery skills but I think it's good to share and will try to do that in this post. Feel free to leave comments with suggestions on how to improve our coding skills. Step 1 The first step is to create the design. My idea was to create a simple 3 fold brochure, so I put together a basic mock in Illustrator Step 2 Now let's create the basic HTML for the document. Basically what we have to create is 5 squares to use as each one of the folds. To do that I will create a basic container using the tag "section" and the 5 squares with the tag "article" Flipping cards Step 3 Let's start add some visuals with CSS. First thing is to create the different parts of the brochure and also the position of each one of them, not worrying too much about the vertical positions. Flipping cards */ Step 4 Now let's start flipping the cards and putting in the right position. It's important to understand how CSS transform works so we can write the css. Here's the summary of what we need to do: #cover: This card will flip from right to left, so the origin (-webkit-transform-origin) will have to be left horizontally. #backcover: This card will be flipped, so you will have to move it to the 0 position left, but flipped 180 to the right. Use -webkit-backface-visibility:hidden to hide it when its rotated. #centerflip will behave like the #cover but the origin will be right instead of left. #centerback will behave like the #backcover but flipping to the other side, also you will have to position it to the right. Here's the full CSS code article{ position: absolute; display: block; width: 600px; height: 600px; left: 600px; top: 200px; } section{ -webkit-perspective: 2000; width: 1800px; background: #f5f5f5; overflow: visible; position: relative; -webkit-transform:scale(.5); } #cover{ background: #fff url(logo.png) center no-repeat; background-size: 250px auto; z-index: 1000000000000000000; -webkit-transform: rotateY(-0deg); -webkit-transform-origin: left bottom; } #backcover{ left: 0; background: #000; color: #fff; -webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg); -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;; -webkit-transform-origin: right bottom; z-index: 10000000000000000; } #centerflip{ background: #ff0; z-index: 10000000; -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg); -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;; -webkit-transform-origin: right bottom; } #centerback{ background: #fff; -webkit-transform: rotateY(-180deg); -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;; -webkit-transform-origin: left bottom; left: 1200px !important; z-index: 10000000000000000; } #center{ background: #000; } Step 5 Now that you have the cards and the layout positioned, let's use Javascript to make the behaviors. We will use jQuery and jQuery Transit for that. jQuery Transit is an amazing plugin that allows us to make simple CSS animations with jQuery. The easiest way to write the script is understand exactly the logic/behavior we want to have User clicks on the #cover and the #cover flips 180deg. The #backcover that is flipped 180deg will flip to 0deg The #centerflip when clicked will flip 180deg. The #centerback that is flipped -180deg will flip to 0deg. Once the brochure is open we will set a variable saying that it's open so we can close the brochure by clicking on it again. Here's the code for that Conclusion This is a basic demo of CSS transformations, it will only run on Webkit browsers for this demo. You can make it work for other browsers by adding their prefixes in the code. The idea is trying to motivate you that is starting out your web design career, to prototype more, to play with code to see how things will behave. That will definitely give you a different and better understanding about design in general. View Demo
Industrial Design Inspiration: Lotus Esira
We love industrial design, it is everywhere, every object was conceived with a goal in mind. That goal, most of the time, is achieved through the design. We have also learned to admire beautiful industrial design work, especially the first phases of the creative process and prototyping. Jack Lamburn's Lotus Esira Concept exemplifies all of this and that's why we would like to share with you here in this post. Jack Lamburn is a designer at James Park Associates. JPA work all over the world focusing their design output on commercial aircraft interiors, airport lounges and hotel interiors. Lotus Esira Personal mood board_ Sketch & development work Model Making Final Scale Model