Well, that was a long and tough semester. Taking 15 hours of credit, plus being sports editor at The Daily Texan plus a web development internship took up a lot more of my time than I originally thought it would. As a result, I didn’t get much time to work on anything WordPress related. In fact, I didn’t get around to updating any of the themes or plugins until a couple of weeks after WordPress 4.5 was released.
But now the semester is finally over, free time has returned (at least for the moment) and I’ve started back on working on personal WordPress development.
As I said back in my WordPress New Year’s resolution, I was hoping to finish a premium WordPress theme/plugin by the end of the semester. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened. But I have gotten a lot of work done on the designs for it (shown at the end). These are still very rough designs and not 100 percent how things will look in the end. I just want to get an idea on how things will look in columns and how much it scales on tablet and mobile.
The most exciting part about the designs, however, is that I tried out a new program from Adobe called Experience. It’s still sort of in its “beta” phase from what I can tell, which is fine. I went into this knowing that.
From my experience (pun completely intended), this is going to be a really useful program in the Creative Cloud suite. I think when it’s finally released, it’ll be a great alternative to designing websites and apps in Photoshop and even Sketch. That being said, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, though some of my “complaints” might just be because their holding back some things for the official release later on.
My biggest complaint is the lack of guides or the ability to add guides. I was flying solo for the entire thing, which was frustrating, especially now as I start designing on the much smaller mobile screens. If they add guides, which given that you can add them in Photoshop and Illustrator makes me think they’ll add it in later, then this will definitely be a great tool.
Also, there aren’t a whole lot of options in the top menu bar. Again, this is probably because it hasn’t officially been released yet, but if they can give the user a wide range of options like in Illustrator and Photoshop, then it’ll be great.
Lastly, it would be cool to crop images inside of Experience itself, rather than having to go to Photoshop, crop it there and then reload it into Experience. It’s relatively nit picky, but I could do that in Sketch so it’d be nice to have it here as well.
Overall, my examination of Experience went pretty well. It’s strong for a program that’s still in sort of the testing mode and not 100 percent complete yet and there’s a lot of room for it to grow. There are some cool features like the repeating grid mode, which makes laying out post sections incredibly easy, and the prototype mode, though that seems to be better suited for apps.
I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes from here and how much it improves before the official release.
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