Wow that looks amazing! I'm pretty interested in kicking the tyres on it though I had a few questions:

• Pricing and Viewers I'm not sure if this is still the case, and I can't confirm from the the pricing page, but if I'm the only designer with ~20 developers, which plan best suits us? Other tools have a contributor limit and unlimited guests which suits our needs given I'm the only regular "user". If we would have to get the Company plan (because that's the only one that mentions "unlimited guests"), then I still can't consider it because I just don't feel it makes sense to us.
• New Feature: Write How easy is it to break the relationship with a text layer between Sketch to Avocode? I'm assuming it'd be smart enough to maintain the link after a layer rename or being placed in a group, but how about:
  • Local Symbols. Will the relationship still exist if a text layer is combined into a local symbol?
  • Library Symbols. If the text layer was in a Library Symbol and the layer structure changes or the symbol is refactored, will the changes still exist or will it revert to Sketch?
  • Overrides. Will a change in Write always override a text override if you pull in the "latest changes?"

Personally, I don't think so. Tools like Drama, Principle and Flinto are really well positioned to experiment on interactions beyond the capabilities of Sketch, Figma, Invision or Marvel. I'm not bothered by both existing to be honest.

When I'm prototyping a flow or sequence of pages, I love the simplicity of what Sketch/Figma provides and I'm happy with them investing up to basic interactions like this.

But when I want to take it further, I like that tools like Framer or Drama exist to experiment with complex interactions without affecting or being impacted by the complexity of my libraries.

Would it be great if there was an all-in-one solution? Sure. But with the state of current tools, there's still so much to improve on that I prefer Sketch and Figma focus on the broader system of the design whereas tools like Framer focus specifically on complex interactions, transitions and animations.

While I really like what Drama is doing, one HUGE gap that it has (which Framer addresses inherently in its approach) is sharing. Framer can send an interactive prototype via a link but Drama currently has no way to do that in an easy way.

Yeah I've been using an 8pt grid for a long time now and that article you posted is a fairly comprehensive write-up of the benefits.

But when I explain it to people, I usually frame the benefits are around the impact to your team's workflow:

• Easier for designers. Since I know I'm pulling from a predefined set of numbers adjusting details in a design is a lot easier. If I need more space, I just nudge by 8, 16 etc.
• Less guesswork for devs. Similarly for developers, since they know the designs have been created from the basis of an 8pt grid, they know their choices are from a limited range. It makes it easier for them to see patterns in a design knowing that there's a system behind it.
• Encourages more accurate results. Because of both of those, it just discourages using arbitrary values. And when it becomes a known system between designers and developers, it just makes the process and workflow a lot smoother.

Bonus: When developers are aware of it too, any discrepancies are easier for them to troubleshoot or fix themselves. Let's say there's an inconsistency in padding on a few components, if they notice it they can just flag it with you and resolution is a lot easier.

Well I wouldn't say no thought went into improving the experience…

Here's a link to their blog post on the rebrand. Provides a little more context on what was done — I like that we get new profile pages honestly. Dribbble Pro members especially.

Yeah I totally get what you mean. If you're working in-house with a large, distributed team this can be a huge problem. I don't have a silver-bullet solution but I'll throw some resources in the mix which will hopefully provide some help.

For qualitative research, Dovetail and Userbit are great purpose-built options. I use Userbit as its pricing is more attractive to smaller teams but have only heard good things about Dovetail. In both cases the biggest draw is being able to record user interviews, tag and highlight trends and monitor over time.

You may have seen a Notion template posted on DN yesterday by Inês Duvergé. This is a great example of how to use Notion for Qualitative Research processes. The result overtime would make it really easy for new hires to consume as the structure would be consistent.

As for quantitative research, this can be a bit trickier to store because I suppose it depends exercise/activity. For example, Analytics, Surveys and Tree Tests are likely facilitated through different services which means the simplest solution is storing the exported file (if it has this functionality) in Google Drive or Dropbox. While this is a fairly manual process, if organised efficiently this might work well for your team's needs. Ideally someone has created summarised reports which should help provide the necessary context of the contents of the repository.

Hope this braindump helped someone out there!

This is great! Thanks for putting this together. I've been meaning to do something similar with Airtable but think this works even better.

Focus Lab are one of my all-time favourite agencies — definitely belong on this list.

Nucleo

It's the whole package. A solid, simple and neutral icon set in a range of sizes. Beyond that it has a mac app which lets you bring into Sketch and other tools (without using Iconjar — which is an amazing tool that I wholeheartedly recommend for storing icons by the way)

You can also do colour edits and export from the Nucleo app.

Another really good set is Streamline. Very high quality and a lot of icons…

☝️ What he said.

I've also started to use Affinity Designer explicitly for icon or logo work and for the most part it's been really good. But last week I ran into a pretty big bug where expanding the stroke resulted in inaccurate results.

Edit: Ok… Seems as though DN doesn't like the video camera emoji. I wrote a message and it didn't publish everything below it and I can't be bothered re-typing it.

TLDR:

• Here's a recording of the "Expand stroke" bug in Affinity Designer.

• It's an issues that they're aware of and has been around since 2017.

• I've made peace with Sketch being terrible at icon work because it's clear that's not where they want to focus (and I'm ok with that). But if Affinity Designer is going to be my go-to tool for icon and vector work, I don't need every feature Illustrator has, but I do need to be able to rely on the accuracy of the fundamental features that it does have (i.e. Expanding Stroke really shouldn't change the shape of my icons, no matter the size).