48 comments

  • Duke CavinskiDuke Cavinski, 4 years ago

    Sketch is also bringing its tools to the browser starting later this year so users can render an entire document, add developer handoff, and allow editing along with collaboration, all without the need to leave the browser.

    Yes, please.

    26 points
    • Gracjan ZlotuchaGracjan Zlotucha, 4 years ago

      +1 That's what forced me to switch to Figma. Possibility to launch software on Win, macOS + everything in one place without hassle to use InVision etc is a big plus

      2 points
      • Tyson KingsburyTyson Kingsbury, 4 years ago

        yup. Ditto. I never really caught the first 'wave' for Sketch when it got started..and by the time it was really rolling, it seemed a bit daunting...so many plugins you needed etc... And at the time, i was using photoshop for pretty much everything... and felt it would be too big a hassle to switch.

        Then a new project started, and i KNEW photoshop just wasn't going to work...plus it was going to need to be able to synch with developers that were off site... and I found FIGMA ... was able to get comfortable with it within a few hours, and it worked like a miracle with our off-site team.

        Sketch may be too late for me to care at this point.... they'd have to have something SUPER compelling to get me to switch from FIGMA...

        4 points
    • Nils Trieu, 4 years ago

      I would switch to Windows right after this.

      3 points
    • Bart S, 4 years ago

      I'm not sure, do they mean a full web-based Sketch with this? If so I'd be stoked but I would expect this to be the biggest news from the entire article. My current place forces me to use Win10, which admittetly isn't as horrible as I originally expected, but I still miss Sketch (and other Mac tools & tricks, but Sketch is a nice start). Figma is good but also isn't as intuitive as I originally thought it was.

      0 points
      • Duke CavinskiDuke Cavinski, 4 years ago

        Agreed, I didn't interpret this as a means to actually use Sketch in the browser as others seem to, but rather improve Sketch cloud with inspect and collab features. Guess we'll see.

        0 points
      • John Williams, 4 years ago

        I think they mean Sketch the tool on the web. It's an easy to way to make a cross-platform app like Slack, Figma, and VS Code.

        0 points
    • John Williams, 4 years ago

      Once you've collaborated real-time in a design it's hard to go back. You feel more like you're a design team and not solo-contributors until UX Design Review.

      3 points
    • Rob GillRob Gill, 4 years ago

      I hope this don't mean the end to Zeplin, I love those guys!

      0 points
  • Andrew C, 4 years ago

    I’m in to this. Sketch’s style of product design (so meta) is designer friendly. Great, reasonable pricing and quality releases (at least after the initial bugs). If they can put together a coherent strategy—which they’ve proven they excel at—I’m all ears because I know it’ll be very seamless.

    Invision’s product strategy is too thirsty (and it’s cohesion between products feel jerry rigged like Adobe... without even the years of debt) and needy. Figma is great but still doesn’t feel right when designing... like the UI gets in the way or something? Framer X is cool af but has a setup cost to import React components. So Sketch building out team features and better prototyping would be killer because they already have the root ‘designing’ toolset pretty spot on.

    I wonder if they’ll buy Zeplin?

    14 points
    • Chris KeithChris Keith, 4 years ago

      Figma is great but still doesn’t feel right when designing... like the UI gets in the way or something?

      Yes. This.

      1 point
      • Andrew C, 4 years ago

        Part of the way Sketch does this is adhering to the visual convention of MacOS. Figma is browser-based so how do they even do that? Feels off though.

        0 points
    • Arthur Klepchukov, 4 years ago

      Invision’s product strategy is too thirsty (and it’s cohesion between products feel jerry rigged like Adobe... without even the years of debt) and needy.

      Absolutely. Hardly any cohesion or UX consistency across InVision. Sharing and commenting on Prototypes is completely unlike sharing or commenting on Freehands, which is completely unlike sharing or commenting on Boards. Consistency does not seem to a goal there.

      0 points
      • Andrew C, 4 years ago

        Yeah. I mean even if the products are supposed to BE different it’s weird they just threw them together so much. Acquiring users (read: revenue) I guess. No shame from me but I don’t trust that product strategy. It leads to the feature soup we’re complaining about now.

        0 points
  • Steven Newman, 4 years ago

    My dream is that they purchase Principle and incorporate their prototyping features.

    6 points
  • Wesley HainesWesley Haines, 4 years ago

    Finally Bohemian understands that it needs to play catch up. Also good for Bohemian for managing to build such a great product and sustainable business without taking investor money.

    5 points
  • Ariel VerberAriel Verber, 4 years ago

    maybe now they can fix the mirroring & add an android app? :)

    5 points
  • Ahmed Sulaiman, 4 years ago

    Good news! Probably we can expect more innovation from Sketch team ;)

    5 points
  • Philip LesterPhilip Lester, 4 years ago

    Terrible news for Figma/Invision/Adobe.

    Incredible news for designers.

    3 points
    • Rob GillRob Gill, 4 years ago

      +1

      Incredible news for design teams around the world not wanting to rethink their tools AGAIN

      1 point
  • Ashish BogawatAshish Bogawat, 4 years ago

    This is interesting. For a few years, it was Figma catching up to Sketch's design toolset. Now that they have done that and taken a lead on a number of other aspects, it is Sketch's turn to play catch up. Plus the competition from the new tools that seem to crop up every month. This is the best time to be a designer.

    3 points
    • Ben GiffordBen Gifford, 4 years ago

      Everyone keeps saying that Sketch is playing catch up. As someone who tried Figma ages ago, could you explain to me how its now better than Sketch?

      0 points
      • Matt Innes, 4 years ago

        I use both Figma and Sketch. Figma has moved faster than Sketch in prototyping terms, to the point where it now has enough functionality for prototyping most flows, though not custom animations / interactions. Sketch on the other hand doesn't have overlays or hover states, so is really a very crude prototyping tool.

        So Figma wins on the "do almost everything in one tool" stakes, but is it a better tool overall ? Sketch + Abstract works well for us for dev handoff & feedback, but yeah, seems like the focus of these funding $$ is all about replicating Abstract within Sketch Cloud, which seems like a waste of time to me. Better prototyping (stateful components in prototypes, overlays, animation) would be much more useful & would move the needle back towards Sketch.

        4 points
      • Nelson TarucNelson Taruc, 4 years ago

        I'm on a team that uses both Sketch and Figma.

        There are more things you can do on Figma that you can't do in Sketch (e.g. real-time collaboration, design handoff to devs, use on PC/browser) than things that Sketch can do that Figma can't (e.g. offline use, more plugins and integrations, better connections to data sources). I would argue that Figma's UI for editing components is more intuitive and easier to use than Sketch's symbol overrides, IMO.

        Many of the newer features such as prototyping, overlays, etc. were released by Figma before Sketch came out with similar stuff. Anyway, if you haven't looked at Figma recently, I'd suggest taking a second look, as it's evolved quite a bit.

        5 points
        • Ben GiffordBen Gifford, almost 4 years ago

          Thank you for the excellent answer.

          I like the idea of a tool that's more integrated—having to involve other parties for more robust prototyping or discussion/collaboration is cumbersome at best.

          I've decided to take the workflow for a spin on the design of a new component we need that has a number of states and interactions. So far I'm very happy with the prototyping and collaboration, while the jury is still out on speed of workflow (for me, that's a heavy reliance on data, layer styles, and components-within-components).

          I appreciate the nudge.

          0 points
      • Andrew C, 4 years ago

        They’re not. Sketch is the king of screen design right now. They just don’t do content marketing like startups that need to grow or they die.

        0 points
        • Ben GiffordBen Gifford, almost 4 years ago

          This is they way I've felt. There's a lot of hype on here about Figma, but I'm hard pressed to find serious design teams (read: large, tech titans) that aren't heavily—if not near exclusively—on Sketch.

          That being said, having tried Figma after a couple of these responses, I will say there are some things that I'm really liking, but also a few big gaps. Hard to say yet if they hype is warranted. we'll see how it pans out …

          0 points
          • Andrew C, almost 4 years ago

            For sure. Figma has some pretty remarkable hustle behind it. Its feature list is very impressive and I hope it grows and innovates in the market.

            I think for me (and you) is there seems to be a lot of hype about Sketch dying out that’s just not realistic. Many of us have been working long enough to watch QuarkXpress, CorelDraw, Flash, and all sorts of software fall to obsolescence. Sketch doesn’t feel that way.

            0 points
  • Kristjan Gomboc, 4 years ago

    Great news! While talking collaboration, can I add Abstract style version control out-of-the-box to the wishlist?

    2 points
    • Henry MoranHenry Moran, 4 years ago

      To start, it would be nice to have a simple version control like Figma. Perhaps eliminate the need to save all together?

      4 points
      • Michael RurkaMichael Rurka, 4 years ago

        Perhaps eliminate the need to save all together?

        This! Although I can imagine the benefits of having hard version controlling like Abstract for big design teams (I can't say from experience). Though, for 1-4 designers – Figma alone can do wonders.

        0 points
  • Nelson TarucNelson Taruc, 4 years ago

    “We need to define a strategy,” says Sá.

    Saw that comment in the article. Didn't give me much confidence that Sketch's founders know how to position the tool as a killer app for enterprise-grade design.

    I hope they prove me wrong.

    0 points
  • n keylen keyle, 4 years ago

    I love sketch but they've priced themselves out of my comfort zone...

    -5 points
    • Ivo MynttinenIvo Mynttinen, 4 years ago

      $100 a year (which you could even stretch by a few months if you don't always need the latest update) is too much for a professional design tool?

      7 points
      • Marc Nothrop, 4 years ago

        …and Figma does cost more for anything above 2 editors.

        Not that I'm against Figma in any way, they've done some great stuff, and definitely have advantages over Sketch.

        IMHO it'd really be great if our discussions could evolve beyond the "who did what first" partisan level, the increased competition in design tools is great for all of us, right?

        As for using Figma, am I the only one who finds their UI a bit uncomfortable, and not as efficient as you might expect? Esp. coming from "native to the web" POV, e.g. super surprised they still don't offer decent text/object/layer search. Hopefully coming.

        Sketch are definitely behind in collab so it's nice to hear they're working on that, and native Paddy and "stacks" are definitely needed ASAP.

        0 points