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Elements of US

Elements of US

 

The United States with all of the states marked up with the regions they belong to along with their Capitals as well as the date they were added to the Union.

USA

Enjoy!

Feel free to come up with your own versions on top of this, Download the Sketch version of this file Elements of US

Photoshop CC 2015 vs Sketch 3.3.2

Adobe just announced an updated suite for the Creative Cloud subscribers with enhanced applications and added functionality. Those with creative cloud subscription will automatically get the updates along with the ability to keep older versions or simply replace them.

A lot of the designers and developers were moving away from Adobe Fireworks and Photoshop in recent years due to Adobe not giving us updates for Fireworks and it’s vast ability to do something that UX designers and designers in general loved; Pages! Yes each page could be a standalone page and have the ability to share assets from other pages.

With Fireworks getting stuck in 32-bit java code world, we all started looking to alternatives, Bohemian Coding created Sketch from the ground up as a 64-bit application for OS X and brought in features from Fireworks in a different way in the form of Artboards.

We’ve used artboards before in Illustrator but Artboards in Sketch gave you a totally new way of constructing application design, may it be mobile, web or desktop.

Sketch also gave us pages and the ability to create symbols and other neat features, besides it being a completely vector driven design workflow.

For at least 3 years we as designers have been using Fireworks and switching over to Sketch. Adobe saw a lot of designers leaving their tools and decided to do what they knew would keep the designers (who hadn’t switched yet)

Adobe finally brought Artboards to Photoshop CC 2015 and they’ve done it very close to how Sketch treats artboards. Popular prototyping application InvisionApp is already supporting Photoshop Artboards and with it expanding it’s user base yet again.

I still have to experiment with Photoshop and see how it plays with creating multi-size exports like Sketch does. But the plug-in support alone still gives Sketch the upper hand, but those familiar with Photoshop will certainly love this new feature of Artboards lifted from Illustrator and given new meaning.

Sketch vs Fireworks (Fight!)

Sketch vs Fireworks (Fight!)

After using Adobe’s Fireworks (Initially Macromedia Fireworks) for over 15 years to design websites, mobile apps, logos, envelopes, and everything under the sun. I’ve decided to switch over the Sketch 3 (I know it seems like I waited on Sketch 2, it’s cause I didn’t know Sketch existed.)

Used Adobe Fireworks entirely to design some remarkable apps for both iPhone and iPads (including retina) and faced at least 10 crashes a day (mainly because Fireworks is still a 32-bit application running on top of Java 6); and Adobe decided to kill all efforts to update it like they’ve continued to advance the versions of Photoshop and Illustrator (both good tools as you’ll read in the article below)

Meng To does an excellent job in comparing the applications available in the market.

Fireworks.. still not vector

A comparison between Adobe Fireworks, Sketch and Photoshop, and why Sketch is the perfect tool for user interface design.

Source: Sketch VS Fireworks

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe today announced the update to their popular software Adobe Creative Suite, replacing it with Adobe Creative Cloud. With the new release, you no longer have the ability to buy the software outright. It’s a good move but you’re completely tied to a system paying as much at $49.99 / month on a yearly contract for the complete collection or $74.99 if you just want to use complete on a month to month basis, and $19.99/month for a single application.

Either way I’m pretty excited about the new tools Adobe has introduced which are part of the Creative Cloud, Adobe Edge Tools, namely: Edge Code, Edge Reflow, Edge Animate and Edge Inspect enabling you HTML5/CSS3 and Javascript responsive design, coding, animations and let you inspect your designs on the several mobile devices.

The one thing that’s got me upset is adobe’s decision to quit on Fireworks after CS6. They’re going to manage the application and update it as required to support newer operating systems but no major update to Fireworks CC, like they’ve done with Photoshop CC, Dreamweaver CC, Illustrator CC and others.

I’ve read that UX/UI designers have jumped ship and using Sketch by Bohemian Coding, I’m going to give it a try but after using Adobe Fireworks for all sorts of designs for over 8 years its hard to learn something new but I’ll give it a try.

Thanks for listening! Adobe Creative Cloud can be found here: www.adobe.com/creativecloud