How Sketch Won Us Over
As a long-term user of the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects), I was apprehensive about switching our team to the new Sketch app. Adobe is a large, stable company, and their products have been synonymous with digital media for as long as I can remember. Creating designs in a brand new app would be risky for a number of reasons. Most notably, we could rely on Photoshop to keep support for older versions (for the most part) so we have the ability to open some of our legacy projects should we need to. The other challenge being that our team (designer and front-end engineers) would have to learn a completely new interface. Around the same time we were thinking about switching, mobile devices were increasingly getting sharper displays. Graphics with resolutions at 2x and the recently introduced 3x were becoming the staple on all of our projects. When researching best workflows for retina graphics we came across a few hacks, but ultimately felt let down by what Photoshop was offering.
With Safari open on my screen, I typed in sketchapp.com, and hit “download” to begin my evaluation period.
It’s Very Fast
When I opened Sketch for the first time, the lightweight speed was immediately noticeable. With Photoshop, sometimes I felt like I could click the icon, go grab a cup of coffee, read a book or two, come back, and it would be just about ready to go (that might be a slight exaggeration). Not so with Sketch. It’s a fast application which is intentionally minimal in its offerings. The result is less time thinking about how slow the software is and more time designing.
Everything is a vector
One of the biggest selling points of Sketch is that everything I put on an artboard, sans photos, is a vector by default. This means everything is easy to export, and available at any resolution. It took me a bit to realize this, but because everything is vector, it actually makes our designs more future proof than ever before. If I were to go back into an old design in Photoshop, most of it would be at the regular 1x resolution. With Sketch, we could easily just select the element, choose what resolution we need it in, and we have it. No more shifting our process to fit within our software: our software now fits within our design process.
Styling is simple
Photoshop has a feature that allows you to apply predefined styles to elements, but it’s always been a bit of a headache for me. In Sketch, “symbols” allow you to apply predefined styles to groups of elements. Not only can I set styles for headlines, paragraphs, and shapes, but it also works for an entire grouping.
For example, let’s say I just put together a nav bar for the top of the website. I can make it a “symbol”, paste it on multiple pages, update it on any page I’m working on, and it updates throughout all my artboards. It’s an incredibly simple way to ensure consistency throughout a design.
Great Customer Support
With almost everything we evaluate, we’re always looking for a company that provides a solid level of support. The team behind Sketch, whether on Twitter or via email, has always been quick to respond to our questions. Not only that, but updates have been released quickly when the community notices a bug.
Interoperability with InVision
This isn’t necessarily a core feature of Sketch (in fact, it’s not one of the app’s features at all), but it plays very nicely with a prototyping tool we use extensively here at Infinite Red called InVision. InVision connects with Dropbox, converts any artboard in the Sketch file to a screen on their platform, and is ready for prototyping within seconds. It’s a workflow that ensures all of our designs are up-to-date on InVision (which makes it easier for developers and clients alike), and is a breeze to work with. We absolutely love it.
A few minor setbacks
Sketch is a great tool that we highly recommend to anyone who works on user experience or visual design projects. It doesn’t go without a few setbacks though. I’ve noticed several bugs that have caused minor annoyance. Also, clients sometimes provide source files in PSD or AI, and Sketch doesn’t import those files.
Workflow was our bottom line
It became clear that Sketch was a major improvement to our digital design workflow. Pair that with the fact that Adobe’s products kept falling further behind and were far more expensive than Sketch, and it became an obvious switch for our team. Give Sketch a try by downloading their free trial today.
