The cleaner interface got rid of distractions and unnecessary menu depth, while the easier-to-access shortcuts helped speed up my workflow.

Sketch also let me work with artboards better as a whole - I can replicate screens rapidly with a single shortcut.

I won't go into too much depth on the pros and cons of Sketch over AI - whatever works for you is always the better tool - but cutting the fat in my day-to-day let me organize my designs better, which helped with prototype construction.

Framer

Now that I can easily create perfect vector illustrations of my app, it was easier to show my team and stakeholders how the screens should look static.

A big piece of user experience design is tricking the user through transitions. This might seem like an odd statement - I'll try to clarify. If I open a news app and click through a few links - the app will, at the least, show each link in a new 'view' or window. Android and iOS usually show these in some kind of pop-up animation. Now, mentally, I'm thinking of all the windows I opened, and how to deal with them - how hard will it be to get back to something I found earlier?

If you can phase-in or blend a new view into a current one, we start to see the app as one experience, rather than a stack of cards.

How can I show some of these transitions, along with some more aesthetic eye-candy? Framer.

Framer is essentially a WYSIWYG CoffeeScript editor. It allows me to draw objects and write simple code to manipulate and animate them - you can build interactive prototypes with click and drag listeners that react to the user. Framer contains some very nice viewing and presentation options, and exports the prototype in a self-contained page that I can host on a webserver for others to play with.

Sketch Integration

The best feature of Framer is that it can auto-import layers from Sketch, and some Adobe products. Every layer and sublayer in Sketch becomes an object in Framer, and they obey the same hierarchy I defined in Sketch, with all the same attributes (placement, opacity, visibility, etc)

In the example below, I wrote a quick prototype to show how our upcoming design for MINE by RelSci on iOS will feature a seamless Relationship toggle.