Instructor Credentials

My name is Melissa Strader, and I’ll be your instructor for the Sketch course. I’ve had many different job titles over the years as the UX field has matured, including UI designer, interaction designer, UX researcher. Now that I’m later in my career, I spend more time leading UX teams.

I’ve worked at both big companies and startups. I led UX teams at both Google and eBay, and I’ve also worked for multiple startups in Silicon Valley. The first startup I did was in 2010, and I’m currently at a series B life sciences startup.

Although I dabbled in design and art for many years, my first official role doing digital product design was at Google, where I was initially a UI designer and eventually my title changed to interaction designer. It wasn’t until I started working at startups in the 2010s, and my second time at Google in 2013, that Sketch came on the scene. Now I’m not particularly tied to one tool - currently I use Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Sketch all for different things.

I’d summarize my career as fusing design and technology to make products better for people. The main disciplines that I’ve drawn from are psychology, human-computer interaction, and computer science. My favorite business sectors are those that help people live their best lives - healthcare and education are especially important to me because they span the entire human experience.

Teaching Strategies

I’m not a teacher in the traditional sense, but I’ve managed, coached, and advised many people. Coaching comes back to designing an experience for an individual. I’m helping to design their entry into the field of design.

Three main areas where I find myself working with beginners is first, I try to get beginners practicing on anything, something, and practice talking about their designs and design decisions. There’s no substitute for practice and critique.

Secondly, I try to remind beginners that the tools are there to support them. Tools support your inspiration, your creativity, your framing of a problem. You can be a fantastic designer with paper and pencil. It’s okay to learn a new tool as you go. There will always be new tools to learn.

Thirdly, I try to remind folks that empathy and problem solving trumps flashiness. It’s easy to let your ego leak into your designs, and that’s not what we’re here for. To me, the glamor is in solving the problem, not in showing off my design skills.

In this course, you will do exercises with me! I’m going to provide you with a file that has finished elements, and I am going to show you sequentially how to create those elements from scratch. There is no substitute for developing the muscle memory to do this yourself. Your practice as a designer can start with this course, so please do open the files and play along.

Course Description

<Sketch, Zeplin, and Marvel: The Synergy> is for beginners who might have wanted to try Sketch but have felt overwhelmed at the idea of picking up a new design tool. We’ll start from scratch, and I’ll teach you the tool the way I would have wanted someone to explain it to me.

I’m tailoring a lot of the exercises for interaction design and UX design, so we’ll cover multiple levels of fidelity which mirrors how it works in the industry. We’ll cover artifacts for a whole project, starting with information architecture, moving to wireframes, and then working with high fidelity designs with some assets and a little bit of prototyping. We’ll cover handoff workflows and how to work with engineers using the tool.

Throughout the course I’ll talk about considerations for your project, your team, and your design practice that are based on my own industry experiences. I hope it will be helpful for envisioning not just what it would look like to use Sketch, but what it would look like to develop a design practice that’s faithful to your strengths and your team’s needs.

To Students

Once you finish this course, you’ll be ready to create all kinds of graphic designs for the workplace or your own freelancing career. Moreover, you will be confident tackling both low and high-fidelity UI designs in Sketch, sketching out an IA for a software application, designing icons and illustrations in Sketch, exporting & sharing designs for feedback, and structuring files and assets to stay organized.

I will teach you to design quickly, efficiently, and precisely so that your work is not only beautiful, but sharp and balanced as well. Plus, I will give you some tips for working with clients and some time-saving tricks that will save you when working under a deadline.