Welcome to the course that will take you from app design to code. This is a three-in-one course aimed at helping you master app design, UI/UX and iOS app development from absolute beginner to advanced professional.
The top iOS apps clearly set themselves apart from all the rest with amazing user interfaces and modern user experience design. We see them featured on the iOS App Store and as winners of Apple’s Design Awards. This simply means that app design and UI/UX are key factors for successful apps. But surprisingly, traditional iOS courses only go as far as teaching you how to build apps with nothing on app design and UI/UX. This course is different in that it goes well beyond just teaching you how to code.This course includes app design and UI/UX to help you build the kind of apps that stand out on the App Store.
We will cover how to use app design tools like Sketch and Figma to create app assets, icons, logos, wireframes, mockups and prototypes. We will learn essential UI/UX principles such as usability testing, user journey mapping, motion design, micro-interactions, typography and much more. We will also master iOS development to bring our app design to code and build over 20 different apps along the way.
What kind of improvements to your app can you expect by the end of this course? A recent study by Forrester Research concluded a well designed user interface could raise conversion rates by up to 200% and a better UX design could raise conversion rates up to 400%. Clearly, learning app design and UI/UX is well worth the effort. It just might be what makes or breaks your app.
This course is perfect for app designers who would like to learn how to code and app developers who would like to learn how to design. If you are an absolute beginner in both design and code you are still in the right place. This course starts by assuming you have never designed or coded before and builds up at a comfortable pace before getting into more advanced topics.
The trick to really mastering design or code is practice and this course recognises that. All our app designs will be created from scratch and our apps will be coded line by line without any help from libraries. Plus, there are dozens of quizzes and challenges to reinforce everything we learn. For more enthusiastic learners, there are further reading topics and bonus articles to help you go beyond this course’s main curriculum.
All the tools we use in this course are free. Sketch is the only exception to this because Sketch requires a paid license to use. If you cannot afford Sketch then that’s no problem! This course includes Figma as an alternative to Sketch and Figma is free. We will cover the same topics in Figma as we do Sketch so there’s nothing you will miss. If you are feeling like taking on an extra challenge, you are more than welcome to master both Sketch and Figma!
I certainly hope to see you around in this course where we have quite the journey ahead of us. Let’s get started with mastering app design, UI/UX and iOS development!
Course Roadmap
-----------------PART 1: App Design and UI/UX--------------
Sketch Basics
In this lecture, we will be discussing how to install Sketch.
App Asset and Icon Design
Let's create our very first app icon with Sketch! In this lecture we will create a settings icon.
For our second icon, we will learn how to create the home icon which is usually found in the tab bar area of most iOS apps.
When we combine shapes together to create icons we still have access to the individual shapes. In this lecture, we will learn how to reduce those shapes into a single path.
We will now create an add icon which lets users know they can add something to the user interface.
Making our icons pixel perfect will be important if we want to be sure they don't appear poor quality when we export them into our apps. In this lecture, we will learn how to do that.
We continue practising how to create icons by learning how to create a profile icon.
In this lecture we will create a friends icon and also learn a few more tricks in Sketch such as converting to outlines.
In this lecture we practise making our final icon. By now, you should have the confidence to combine shapes together to make app icons. This will be a primary skill before you use the vector tool to create more sophisticated app icons.
Our icons are cluttered! In this lecture, we will put everything in order.
This challenge concludes everything we have learnt about creating app assets and icons.
Foundational Design Principles
Despite often being referred to together, UI and UX are actually distinct processes that contribute to app design. In this lecture, we will attempt to understand what both mean.
Design methods have evolved over time to favour more minimalistic user interfaces. This lecture is dedicated to examining this trend and exploring some of the tried and tested concepts we can use in our own apps.
We will be exploring Apple's iOS Design Theme which should be the guiding principle behind our app design.
In this lecture, we will get to know about the colour wheel which is a visual tool that helps in finding the right colours for your app.
Let us finally use the color wheel to find an appropriate color rule to use in our app.
Typography is how you use words to convey meaning. We will be looking at the strategies you can use to effectively use type in your app.
App Logo Design and The Vector Tool
Low Fidelity Wireframing (Lo-Fi)
We examine the theory behind wireframes answering questions such as, "What are wireframes?", "Why are they important to app design?" and "How are they developed?".
We look at the app concept and strategise how we will build our wireframe. Our focus in this and the next few lectures is to create the wireframe for a Bitcoin app.
We create the tab bar of our wireframe and also get to practice using Sketch's templates.
We will now create symbols for our wireframe's tab bar to make it easy to reflect changes across our art boards.
We turn our attention to the home screen of our wireframe.
We will now create the transfers screen. We are aiming to create a screen that shows a history the friends we have paid and a list of the friends we currently have.
This is our final wireframe. Here we will create a screen that displays news on Bitcoin.
High Fidelity Wireframing (Hi-Fi) and Atomic Design
In this lecture we discuss what low and high fidelity wireframes are. The principles we learn here also apply to mockups.
We add more fidelity to our wireframe by adding tab bar icons.
We finally move on to create our first mockup building on what we have learnt from wireframes. This is part 1 of our home screen mockup.
We complete our home screen mockup.
Mockups
Foundational User Experience (UX) Principles
This challenge concludes everything we have learnt about user experience principles.