Apple Pencil makes app designers stand up and shout

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iPad Pro and Apple Pencil keep designers happy and eraser dust-free.
iPad Pro and Apple Pencil keep designers happy and eraser dust-free.
Photo: Apple

The iPad Pro and Apple Pencil are making paper and pencil design workflow a thing of the past.

Amanda Somers, a user experience (UX) designer for mobile app developer Mindsea Development, writes on Medium about her newfound respect for the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro combination.

“We are confident in saying we are able to sit down with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and create something just as good, if not better, than sketching traditionally using pencil and paper,” she writes.

Somers took to blogging platform Medium to sing the praises of Apple’s tools.

With the natural feel and zero latency of Apple Pencil, Somers and her team are able to put traditional paper and (lead) pencil away and mock up user interfaces for their iPhone apps quickly, iterating on concepts right on the iPad Pro, something that took much longer in the past (and used up quite a bit of eraser, pencil lead and paper).

Instead of hashing it all out on various pieces of paper, scanning the designs into a computer, and then re-working it all again digitally, the team can now skip the analog step and work directly on the iPad Pro.

The app they use most seems to be Adobe Comp CC, which lets them mock up designs with vector graphics tools that ensure straight lines and pixel-perfect layouts.

“iPad Pro eliminates eraser dust and stacks of unnecessary paper sketches,” writes Somers. Now we are able to copy and paste a sketch we’ve done, erase parts we don’t like and iterate on top of that. From there, we can simply Airdrop the sketch to our computers.”

The artists and designers I’ve run into who have used the iPad Pro and accompanying Pencil have nothing but the best of things to say about both the devices and the ecosystem. While many pundits crow that the iPad Pro hasn’t sold as much as hoped, it’s stories like these that truly show how Apple continues to make products that help everyone create.

Be sure to read Somers’ full Medium post to get the full effect.

Via: Daring Fireball

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