After Adobe presented new tools known as the Creative Cloud in May last year, they forgot to mention Fireworks. At least that’s what we thought, but after Adobe posted “The Future of Adobe Fireworks”, we realized that we should look for another design tool.

Considering the fact that we primarily create design for web and mobile applications, we needed a tool focused on screen design.

Before Adobe’s announcement, there was some buzz on Twitter about a Fireworks/Photoshop alternative, a tool by Bohemian Coding called Sketch. Since moving away from Fireworks would happen sooner or later, there was no harm in exploring our options early on.

At first glance, Sketch’s interface really reminded me of Keynote – a focus on User Interface design with all the functions that you actually need right in front of you. Sure, I needed a few hours of getting used to the new interface, but very soon I was able to get the desired results quickly.

One thing that really caught my eye is the export for retina displays. That gave us a good hint about the direction in which Sketch was developing and we felt it could become a really great tool.

Although we were pleasantly surprised by the look and feel of Sketch, we didn’t immediately embrace it as our primary design tool.

We decided to wait for a while, checking every update that came along until it reached a certain level of stability.

The breaking point, so to speak, was version 2.3, which brought some very cool features:

This pushed us to start testing Sketch in a serious way – on real projects. While doing client work was still a bit dodgy, we gave it a go on some of our internal projects and products. One of them is Productive, a business intelligence tool we originally created for internal use, but have released it to the general public recently.

While we were busy testing Sketch on real projects, the Sketch community grew really fast. Some of the major players in tech industry such as Google, Twitter, Foursquare and SoundCloud also started to use Sketch, which was a perfectly good testament to its quality.

After April 1st this year, with Sketch 3 published, we decided to replace Fireworks with Sketch and use it as our primary tool for design.

Even though Sketch is a great tool, it still has some room for improvements. The awesome thing is, the guys at Bohemian Coding are doing a great job by listening to the designer community and accepting their ideas.

Comparing Sketch with Fireworks, here are some things we really like:

Of course, there is always room for improvement. Here are some features we would like to see implemented:

All in all, while Fireworks was a workhorse of our design department for a very long time, Adobe’s decision to axe it and coax people into Creative Cloud subscription model pushed us to find a worthy alternative. If Adobe actually introduced a real successor to Fireworks, we probably wouldn’t spend time exploring other options.

Then again, in Sketch we really found a tool that suits our needs. Bohemian Coding’s software proved its worth and by the looks of it, can only get better with further development.

As our company grows, we handle more and more projects simultaneously. We soon realized that we need to implement a well-defined folder structure and naming convention to keep things running smoothly.

A part of the success as a consulting company is having a steady stream of new projects coming your way. If you want to tackle them all, you need to have multiple teams working on multiple projects at the same time. At Infinum the developers are organized into teams according to the target platform – iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Web.

The design team closely cooperates with the development teams to provide them with the required assets – fonts, backgrounds, icons and everything else they need. We use this basic structure to organize our folders, as our main focus is to help each employee locate and access the required file or folder as quickly as possible.

Each folder should be named after the project and it should contain the following subfolders: Resources, Design, Screenshots and Export.

If the project includes doing work for more than one platform (e.g. Android and iPhone), the folder structure changes a little. The root folder is still named after the project itself, but files in it are grouped under the respective platform names (e.g. Android, iOS or Web). The only exception is the Resources folder, which stays just one level below the project folder.

If you are wondering what’s located in all these folders, here’s how it works:

The name of a source design file has to contain the name of the project, platform name and version number, in this exact order. Every iteration of the source file should be saved as the next version. This enables us to easily find an earlier iteration, compare and discuss the different stages of design.

We still use Adobe Fireworks as the primary software for screen design. Naming pages in it is the easiest way to keep screenshots organized after export. Each page name should contain an ordinal number and a screen name. After exporting pages to a folder, each JPG file inherits the name of the page.

Since the design team cooperates with all other teams at the company (and basically works on all the projects), the list of our projects is a lot bigger than theirs. Therefore, clicking through Finder can be really frustrating. For much easier access to files and folders we use Alfred.

With Alfred you can easily access applications, files and folders, quickly search the web and much more. As we have a very strict structure of file names, Alfred allows us to access them directly and open them with Fireworks, which is a lot more convenient and faster than doing the same thing with Finder.

Instead of using a local server or network storage infrastructure, we trust Dropbox with our files. Our Internet connection is pretty reliable, and even if it fails, we still have local copies of all the files we are working on. There are two more big perks of using Dropbox – automatic cloud backup and automatic resolving of conflicted copies. Best of all, basic accounts with 2 gigs of storage space are free and additional space is not that expensive.