~ An Overview

The Problem

My family is extended around the globe. The inspiration for Foreign Ipsum is my friends and family around the world. I wanted to make a Sketch plugin to make designer's lives easier while incorporating my friends & their languages.

Many designers deal with the challenge of finding the right copy to fill their designs before handing them off. It takes precious time to come up with and write the copy needed to showcase how a design should look.

The go to filler text for designers is Lorem Ipsum, but it's become a bit underwhelming and annoying to see over and over in the past few years.

The Idea

Due to the repetition of Lorem Ipsum in almost every design, I wanted to do something different. After discussing an alternative to Lorem Ipsum with a few designers, I challenged myself to build a Sketch Plugin to help them save time and add a unique spin to their designs using the following problem statement:

How might I create a Sketch Plugin to improve a designer's workflow while adding a unique spin to their designs?

Pausing for Clarity: This is an active side project with 500+ users.

The Project

Development

I kicked off the project by reading through many Medium articles, the Sketch Plugin documentation, and reaching out to a few friends for guidance. After I understood a decent amount of what was required to write a Sketch plugin, I started writing the Javascript code and testing it in Sketch.

Through trial and error using the documentation, I wrote a fairly simple Javascript file that took the content of a text layer on run and replaced it with the selected language from the plugin menu.

This helped make the plugin lightweight and run quickly, saving time for designers. However, development wasn't as easy as it sounds, and I ran into a few roadblocks along the way.

Roadblocks

While the plugin has improved over 500 designer's workflow; development proved to be a challenge for the following reasons:

• A lack of understanding: I was brand new to Javascript and had no idea what it took to build a working Sketch plugin.
• A large amount of confusion: Details within the documentation were helpful but led to confusion in areas that I had no familiarity with.

Nevertheless, I worked tirelessly to turn the idea I had into a working product to improve designers' workflow and was successful.

The Launch

On May 16, 2017, I launched the first working version of Foreign Ipsum on Product Hunt. This was my second launch on Product Hunt, and I didn't have many expectations. However, the community embraced the plugin, and it was featured on the home page bringing in users from all over the web.

The Future of Foreign Ipsum

Foreign Ipsum hasn't received an update for quite some time now because I've decided to focus on wrapping up college and searching for internships.

In the future, I plan to bring an interface to the plugin, making it easier for users to select their desired language. This would help them save more time when designing their mockups to share with teammates or clients.

Building Foreign Ipsum was a challenging but rewarding experience that helped me better understand GitHub, Javascript, and other tools for development, ultimately expanding my skill set and building on my knowledge of development.

Download Foreign Ipsum

If you're a designer and find Foreign Ipsum interesting or want to use it for your projects, check it out and install it using GitHub. You can also add your own language on GitHub!

Thanks for Reading!

I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read through my experience building Foreign Ipsum to get a better understanding of my process. If you have any questions about my experience building Foreign Ipsum, please reach out! I’d love to discuss it with you!

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