Richard Bruskowski

Richard Bruskowski

Stuttgart, Germany Freelance Designer bruskowski.design — Product, Brand, Design Systems & Prototyping Joined almost 8 years ago

  • 11 stories
  • 48 comments
  • 251 upvotes
  • Posted to My freelance portfolio, built with Gatsby, Framer Motion, react-three-fiber, … Feedback welcome!, in reply to Michael McKeever , May 19, 2020

    Thank you! Yeah, once again this has made me appreciate the work frontend developers do, especially while trying my luck at building a custom video player that works on different platforms and in different browsers. :)

    1 point
  • Posted to My freelance portfolio, built with Gatsby, Framer Motion, react-three-fiber, … Feedback welcome!, May 18, 2020

    It's built with Gatsby, MDX, Emotion, Framer Motion, react-three-fiber and Lottie. Hosted on Netlify. Fonts are from Klim Type Foundry and Pangram Pangram.

    Tools I've used: VS Code, Sketch, Blender, Procreate, After Effects, Framer X, Codesandbox and some more.

    Had a lot of fun working on it! Although, at times I felt overwhelmed by technical challenges outside of my comfort zone as a designer, but resources and active help from peers and the open source community got me back on track. Definitely learned a lot new things.

    Started to spend time on it during the winter holiday break last year and for sure am not finished yet or ever will be, but for the moment I am happy enough to share.

    Feedback, thoughts and questions welcome!

    1 point
  • Posted to Which tool(s) are you using for designing UI animations?, May 04, 2020

    I've went through a fair share of tools myself and ended up using Framer for most of these tasks. Here's why:

    • Timeline based tools are nice for exploring and creating a specific transition, but oftentimes UI interactions have more dimensions/are more complex than that.
    • With tools that are easy to begin with, I often hit a roadblock at a certain point where whatever I wanted to create wasn't possible, at least not the way I had imagined. With Framer, basically everything that's possible on the Web is possible in the tool one way or the other.
    • Some stuff that's implemented with 3 lines of CSS in Code is really painful to recreate with a motion design tool. In Framer I can simply use CSS whenever I want.
    • If some part of the interaction I am exploring has already been done properly in development, I can (with some effort) use that code (or the whole component) and build on top of that instead of rebuilding it. I also can built on top of established design systems like Material UI etc.
    • With Framer you can build simple flows quickly and invest more time building out specific interactions later if and where it makes sense. You don't have to maintain a low-fi clickdummy and hi-fi interaction prototypes separately. You don't have to decide upfront if you want to got lo-fi or hi-fi either.
    • If I decide to built out a specific interaction in high-fidelity, the effort put in there is not completely lost when handing over to production as the code is usually readable or even usable for developers.
    • I can reuse stuff I've built in one project in another project pretty easily. That's a big bonus for me.
    • I can copy paste from Sketch or import from Figma (in Web Beta only at the moment) then continue in Framer. The layers are not reduced to bitmaps or anything unusable. It's not 100% perfect, but most stuff imports well and the rest is easily fixed. It's not "synced" though, but I find that preferable because with syncing I never felt sure if my latest edits in layout will break the prototype. You can also built flows with exported screens as bitmaps though, if you need to move fast.
    • With Magic Motion (in Beta only at the moment) you have a Smart/Auto Animate feature that also exists for production (React only, though)
    • Everything is built on components, so you can have multiple instances with the same behavior in your layout without any overhead.
    • You can separate data from your prototype, which makes maintenance easier.
    • There are packages for a lot of common challenges you might face. You can either use them directly if they are suitable for your project, or learn from them.
    • You have a canvas. So you can move stuff around, make duplicates, try things, keep them for later, organize screens visually, zoom out to get an overview, zoom in to adjust details. As a designer I need that.
    • You can export your prototypes, host them yourself for sharing e.g. to comply with client needs.

    Also heard good things about Protopie. For me personally, I like about Framer that it's built on standard web technologies and React, so everything I learn along the way, I can apply beyond prototyping with Framer, no evil lock-in. Also Framer's UI fits in neatly with what you might be used to from design tools like Sketch and Figma or IDEs like XCode, obviously they are putting a lot of thought into that.

    0 points
  • Posted to What did you read in 2019?, Jan 09, 2020
    • Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
    • Just Enough Research, Erika Hall
    • Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro
    • The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
    • Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, Kat Holmes
    1 point
  • Posted to Ask DN: Favorite design-related podcast to follow?, Jan 03, 2020

    Not even closely keeping up with all of these, but hand picking single episodes whenever I feel like listening to a design related podcast (typically on longer train rides) from this pool:

    • Design Details
    • New Layer
    • This is HCD
    • Jake and Jonathan
    • The Observatory
    • Revision Path
    • Google Method
    • 99% Invisible
    • Adobe Wireframe
    • Framework
    • Design Better Podcast
    1 point
  • Posted to Sponsor: Brainstation's digital skills survey results for 2019 are in!, Feb 21, 2019

    I didn't find any information on the amount of participants, their regional distribution or anything else which gives a hint on how meaningful these numbers might be. Did I miss that maybe?

    While not claiming to be representative or anything, https://uxtools.co/survey-2018 tells us how many people responded.

    0 points
  • Posted to Dropbox dialing their new(-ish) branding down?, in reply to Eduardo Nunes , Oct 18, 2018

    I guess you need to switch the language to English (UK or US) to see the old design Bryan is talking about. You can choose the language at the very bottom. The design is not the only difference though, the english landing pages also seem to speak more to business prospects while all the non-english landing pages put more of an equal weight on private/freelancer prospects and larger businesses. Not sure, but I think I remember that both these designs have been around in parallel already at the time of the launch of the new brand design. Looking at both, I feel the new brand design makes the baby-blueish-gray older design look pale and dated in comparison.

    2 points
  • Posted to Brutal design by Adidas, in reply to Julian Baker , Oct 16, 2018

    Probably an intentional part of the experience. I started to get 403 errors just now.

    -1 points
  • Posted to What's the best font manager right now? I'm tired of SkyFonts..., in reply to Maiken v V. , Oct 15, 2018

    Can you organize (group or better: tag) fonts, e.g. by brand or project and sync these groups/tags to the whole team as well? I think that was the one crucial missing team feature last time I checked.

    0 points
  • Posted to Sketch 52 released, Oct 02, 2018

    Just wait a little bit if you rely on Sketch Runner a lot. It's currently incompatible, but they're working on a fix: https://twitter.com/Sketch_Runner/status/1047091781345718272

    9 points
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