Dmitriy Fabrikant is the developer half of the designer-developer partnership that founded Specctr. (UI designers use Specctr to quickly create design blueprints containing the essential type, color, and spacing information developers must have to turn design into beautiful product, all from inside their favorite design tools.) Before stacking bits as a web developer, Dmitriy stacked bricks as a real estate developer. In real estate development no one would dare start construction without a blueprint. Working as a front-end developer Dmitriy saw it happen all the time, often to the project’s detriment. That’s why when talented designer Chen Blume approached him with the idea for Specctr, he knew they had to build it together. The links for this article were saved and organized using Knovigator. A simple bookmarking tool Dmitriy built to organize the content he liked around the way he searched.
Design blueprints could mean the difference between a correctly implemented design that improves the user experience and satisfies customers and a confusing and inconsistent design that corrupts the user experience and displeases customers. For those of you who create digital products, design specs could mean the difference between efficient collaboration and a wasteful back-and-forth process with costly implementation mistakes and delivery delays. Specs can help you to build the right product more quickly and more efficiently. Effective collaboration requires effective communication. Investing in the development of workflows and tooling around to make this communication easier will pay off big with the effectiveness with which products are built.
Read more…
Almost anything you can do through Fireworks’ interface can also be achieved by writing a simple JavaScript extension. Dmitriy Fabrikant learned to develop Fireworks extensions by writing the Specctr plugin. While working on Specctr, he had witnessed Fireworks’ passionate community actively support the app (Sadly, Fireworks CS6 is the last major release from Adobe). Now that we can’t expect Adobe to add any more features to Fireworks, the ability to extend the app becomes even more important, because many designers still rely on it, and through extensions, new features and panels can be added. This article is aimed at those interested in developing extensions for Fireworks.
Read more…
