> Omvlee decided to design his application to run natively on OS X. This was very smart. Although Omvlee could have reached a considerably wider audience by designing Sketch for Windows (or OS X and Windows), focusing on the Mac market was highly strategic
Sketch exists thanks to the genius of Quartz / Core Graphics. It does not have a rendering engine per se and struggles even with path ops [1].
This technical debt may soon be the end of Sketch. Because apart from Adobe, there is now Figma with smart people like Evan Wallace who can really "decide" [2][3].
With C++ core, Figma can go fully native [4], and it's puzzling why they have done this already.
"on the long term this looks like a major mistake."
Thank God you didn't make a mistake like this, where you build a company around a profitable product making millions of dollars, but might one day feel bad because there are other customers who can't buy your product, who likely wouldn't buy your product anyways!
Heh, so maybe I was overly sarcastic in my tone, assuming you were just criticizing from the sidelines. :)
I suppose the less sarcastic version, is that Sketch is just a happy accident. A class project, that turned out to be very close to something solving a real problem for a significant market of people willing to pay money for a solution to that problem.
Affinity Designer is an excellent tool for illustration and graphic design, and it can work as a UI design tool as well (better at least than Illustrator or Photoshop), but nothing else (outside of browser-based tools) has quite leaned into the UI design niche like Sketch has.
Sketch turned an important corner when it introduced two things: Symbol overrides and scaling constraints. These two things made UI design in Sketch a massively more streamlined process than any other product, and while other packages have started to adopt them, Sketch has stayed ahead by further developing these features along with shared library support and a robust plugin API enabling further workflow-enhancing tools like Sketch Runner.
Sketch is, however, fairly terrible as a general-purpose vector editor. Its clumsy shape tools are bad enough that I usually start any icon design in Affinity Designer and then import to Sketch.
I'm glad you mentioned this. There are many reasons why I'm no longer using Sketch, but their weird pricing model is the reason I finally decided enough was enough.
And Affinity Designer is incredible on the iPad/iPad Pro as well. Amazing vector and raster tools and its pretty much a straight port of the desktop version.
Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro, Graphic, Sketch. I purchased them all, trying to find which I prefer. All excellent actually.
Affinity Designer isn‘t really comparable, it‘s more a general vector tool for artist and creating from scratch, not a design/prototyping environment for designers with a rich ecosystem and integrations.
"Now running on Metal and with a brand new tiling system for the Canvas, Sketch performs better than ever when moving, resizing and manipulating layers in a large or complex document — up to 2.7x faster than Sketch 51!"
It is a nice PR article, but if i was working at Bohemian, I wouldn't get overly confident. Sketch indeed did a nice job, and they carved out a market segment, but in doing so they caught Adobe's attention and it now responded by launching XD. As with a corporation that size, the response was maybe slow, but it is picking up steam and I speculate that in a few years XD will be an extremely tough competitor for Sketch. XD is already fairly good (sometimes better), it's already cross-platform, and Adobe has a relatively large and rather competent team of developers working on it. So I have little doubt that they'll soon have a better product on most, if not all aspects (1). The only thing that could derail it at this point is loss of executive support, but there's absolutely no sign of that, and I doubt it will happen.
[disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but these are absolutely personal opinions, nothing vetted by my employer. And I don't work at XD, though I do know lots of people who do. ]
(1) Adobe did that before. Witness e.g. Lightroom vs. Aperture, InDesign vs. Quark. It can be a formidable competitor when it's serious about something. And I get the feeling this time they are.
> Adobe has a relatively large and rather competent team of developers working on it
This sounds a lot like Lightroom, which naturally raises the question of when it's put into maintenance mode and the good developers are moved onto other projects. I uses Lightroom a few times when it was released and then tried it again when Flickr did that promotional pricing deal and it was amazing how slow and buggy it had become by then — literally unusable on a Mac which Aperture ran great on.
The sales process I got while cancelling the yearly subscription for something which didn't work also means that having Adobe in the name is an automatic deal-breaker for any purchase.
The combination of both Windows and Lightroom being so incredibly buggy has pushed me to Linux last week. Previously I couldn't make the switch because I couldn't work the same way. But changing from 'work the same way' to 'achieve the same output' in my mind has meant I have been able to make the transition.
I think you working at Adobe make you a little delusional about XD. I can bet that you have never actually used XD for any serious work if you really think that it’s already good or even better than Sketch. It’s nowhere near as good as sketch and is very incomplete, heck they added dotted line support only a few months ago. Figma and maybe Framer(a little different) are the biggest competition for sketch now imo. XD is mainly used by those who were still stuck in photoshop and now are trying to move to something better.
By "sometimes better" I meant "some aspects", not necessarily that it's overall better right now (and especially not for everybody - it might never be "better for everybody" simply because people are very diverse in needs and preferences).
I wouldn't call it "delusional"; "biased" maybe - that's why I called out my affiliation to Adobe. Makes me know some things, and also makes me biased. Yes I'm a developer, not a designer, and have never used XD (I don't work on it) - so feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt. It's still a datapoint, I actually believe that XD will be a significant competitor in the years to come. You're free to believe I'm wrong - but don't think that I'm saying it just to support my employer, it's not the case.
I have not met any designers outside of Adobe that are enthusastic about XD, except those who have been given free (or endorsed) subscriptions. It's odd.
I'm forever put off Adobe as a company because of their past treatment of markets outside the US.
There was a point where Adobe were selling the same products in the UK as the US, with no localisation or other changes, downloaded from the same servers, for about twice the price.
There's many reasons why the market tolerated this at the time but now there are good enough competitors for what I do I know I don't want to rely on Adobe as a supplier ever again.
Why? The subscription model made their software much cheaper. CS used to cost something like 3.5k, now it's 720 a year including all updates. Sounds OK to me....
By your reasoning you're not expecting people to use the same software for more than ~4 years.
I bought Adobe Master Collection CS4 (student edition, for $1000) way back in 2008 and have been using it for the past ten years. It runs even better than it did back then because of the better hardware available now! The subscription model would have been much more expensive for a user like me.
You were lucky. Apple doesn't guarantee long-term compatibility of applications on Mac OS. You bought just after the latest Mac transition, so your ten years didn't happen to cross any big one (OS X, 2001; x86, 2006).
I bought some Adobe software in 2001, and it was a gigantic pain to get it working under early OS X (hours on the phone with Adobe), and wasn't usable under Rosetta, 5 years later.
If the rumors and historical trends are to be believed, we're on the verge of another transition. I would not buy an expensive binary blob for Mac today without an assurance I could get an upgrade, if/when there's another architectural transition.
I ran into this yesterday. I use Illustrator infrequently, in spurts, to do mapping work for a non-profit that donates our volunteer time to work on mountain bike trails in parks. I last purchased CS6 on a non-profit license because my of minimal use --- a week or two at a time every six months or so --- which really doesn't fit with the subscription model.
I hadn't fired it up since updating to Mojave, and last night when I went to update one of our maps I found that Illustrator CS6 pretty much isn't usable. It's so ridiculously slow that trying to type out a string of text on a blank artboard beachballed and took almost a minute for the 20 characters to display.
The workflow can't move to Affinity Designer because it's not really compatible with AI files[1], and I really don't want to get into the subscription model because even the non-profit license is $200+/year. Thankfully the CS6 perpetual license is for Windows as well, so I can spin it up in a VM... And MS is really good at backwards compatibility.
But it really sucks not being able to use it natively as I have for years.
[1] It'll open the PDF portion, but for a map with lots of complicated lines, these get changed from single paths in Illustrator to lots of curves in PDF. It's a mess trying to put these back together.
Their pricing is way too high as developer tools just because they have near monopoly.
Top of the line programming tools like Jetbrains give you their entire list of about 10 apps for $12 or so a month from 3rd year (Starting from about $20 a month for the 1st year) and of course individual apps are even cheaper.
Heck, even MS gives you the entire office suit for $10 a month with 1TB of cloud storage which I think is a good deal.
We need more competitors to drag Adobe's monopoly down. Their apps are built on ancient code, the performance is so bad compared to apps like Affinity Photo and they put folders and icons all over the Application folder on Mac I can't believe its annoyance.
I do find it somewhat rich that on a forum where the overwhelming advice for entrepreneurs is "Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.", people complain about pricing. I guess it's different when you're on the other end :)
I don't know, man. I guess they will charge what the market lets them get away with. It's a for-profit business, and if they do one thing right, it's marketing & sales. You might be pissed off about the pricing, but the market stands behind it - there was a lot of skepticism even internally on the subscription model, but I think the executives were proven right on this one. You may hate them for it, and anecdotally it's easy to find Adobe haters... but not all the market does. AFAICT, far from it, there are still way more promoters than detractors. And the subscription pricing opened up a large market that nobody even thought existed - not to mention the fact that it made revenue streams more predictable. At this point, I think it's really hard to argue that the pricing is hurting the company in any way - if you look at the numbers that is, not at anecdotes about how one particular person/ set of persons feels about it.
Assuming an 8 hour day and two days worth of billable work, that assumes you are making or your company is billing you out at $45/hour. Not exactly highest average salary.
But if you aren’t a professional designer, you no more need Adobe’s high end offering than a non professionally developer needs to spend thousands on an MSDN license.
not even close. Maya and 3dsmax start at $1500 a year. I'm pretty sure most other professional 3d software is in a similar ballpark or more. The apps are complex and the market for them is arguably not large enough to support the development costs at a lower price point. AutoCAD is another example. Even Unity is $1500 a year. Pro Audio tools are in a similar category.
A lot of people and small businesses updated very rarely. Often only when forced to by something like an OS upgrade. It’s only cheaper if you were a person or business that could afford an annual upgrade cadence.
While you are right in practice, your reasons are wrong. It’s not because these companies can’t afford it, as mentioned it’s actually cheaper. The part you referenced, about forced upgrading, is often more costly than simply having a subscription that routinely keeps the software updated. The problem is three fold:
1. Small businesses don’t upgrade because they fear change in general. Buttons disappearing, functionalities changing and new things like cloud integrations scare/confuse a lot of them. They also don’t want the pain of paying people for time to relearn what used to work just fine.
2. Subscription costs are very much more visible on P&L’s than one time expense charges. When the eventual tight times come, recurring costs are the first thing on the chopping block.
3. As you know, cutting most subs means cutting functionality as well. For small places like photography studios, they don’t want their core software to be beholden to a required recurring expense. They want to own it, so if all else goes away, at least it still gets the job done.
It’s often simplified to be a cost thing, but it almost never really is. They can afford it, but they don’t like what they give up in the model.
I think people fear change in software because updates have a habit of making the user experience worse. Think of the troubling trend in web design where they take away customization options and add more padding to everything to be "mobile friendly".
This is a valid concern but your comment really highlights a big problem with these discussions: your wording implies that this is universally bad but your examples are both things where it's impossible to say whether a given move is a win, loss, or wash without fairly detailed data. An increasing percentage of people are either mobile-only or mobile-primary, so making things mobile/tablet friendly is probably a good idea for most sites. Similarly, customization has significant training and support costs and removing infrequently used features to add things more people care about is a classic business trade-off.
There's no real reason for a customer to care about these trade offs. They want to get work done, nor worry about the business model behind one of their tools.
That's looking at the problem backwards: if you have one customer who has a bunch of customization requests you need to weigh their business against what other work you could be doing with the same development time. It's not a win if you keep one customer but lose others to a competitor whose product is easier to use or cheaper to develop, especially since I've probably seen at least a 1:10 ratio for arcane features and customizations which a customer swears up and down are mission critical to things which actually are — usually it's more like one guy doesn't want to consider changing the way he works in the slightest until forced.
Adobe software became notably worse (IMO) shortly before they went to subscription model. I remember the change from Illustrator CS2 > CS3, they totally ruined the flow. It feels like they make changes just for the hell of it sometimes.
It depends on how quickly they add things which matter to you. The break-even point for their pricing was a little over a year – e.g. Lightroom used to cost $150 new / $80 for upgrades and it's $10/month so if they are regularly shipping improvements you want the subscription is a good deal but if it's fluff or support for hardware you don't have you're still paying.
Yeah, that was basically my point: if you actually use most of what you get it's a good deal. If your usage has been stable for awhile you're probably overpaying for the possibility that your usage will change.
Your question misses the point. With Sketch you _can_ subscribe to updates, which is entirely optional. The software is yours to use forever. Whereas with Adobe you _must_ subscribe and pay rent. If you fail to pay your regular fee, the mob will enter your workshop and drag out the tools you‘re dependent on (virtually speaking).
Recently I had to use XD because the designer use said tool for their design and oh boy I can assure you no developer want to touch anything adobe related. Just to use XD, I had to install so many craps from Adobe in my Mac.
Big reason for this is probably pricing. Adobe's subscription model is hard on startups, small companies & especially individuals, so people naturally look at alternatives. And then they realize that Photoshop isn't quite the monopoly it once was, and apps like Sketch, Affinity & Co. offer similar feature set, while also being more specialized for the job.
Pricing is a part of it, sure, but the real reason I think is that Sketch was designed from the group up to be a tool for creating digital UI. Without the clutter and legacy of Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop, it was a breath of fresh air. Also, I think it has an important advantage of feeling like a native Mac app. I always feel like I’m firing up a virtual machine when I start Adobe products.
On my aging Lynnfield i5 and spinning-rust HDD, GIMP takes 2 seconds to open (I just timed it - from pressing return in a terminal, to all windows appearing on screen). That is faster than most websites load these days. And I should add that I have quite a lot of custom Python plug-ins installed.
There's a lot of valid points that can be criticized about GIMP. Speed is not one of them.
I actually use an old version of Photoshop in a Windows VM because it's faster than a native modern version. As a perk, I don't worry that it's going to break if I upgrade OSX.
It really is ridiculous. I spent a significant chunk of of my teenage years in Photoshop 6, 7, and CS1 doing all sorts of things and whenever I open it today I find myself shocked at how sluggish and weighed down it’s become. It’s still a powerful tool, but if I had the choice I would absolutely pay full price for a version of 7 or CS1 tweaked to run on modern OSes over the current subscription that feeds an infinite bloat cycle.
I had an individual Photoshop subscription that kept climbing in cost due to unfavorable dollar exchange rates. One day I audited my account and realized I was paying nearly INR 10k/year (>$120/year) for a tool I barely used, but stuck around with because I was just too comfortable with the UI.
Ditched my subscription and started using PhotoPea.com. Same UI, no costs. For my lightweight use, it's perfect.
I was surprised this article doesn't mention DrawIt [1], Bohemian Coding's first (?) drawing app designed for UI elements and icons, which would seem rather familiar to any Sketch user today. It combined vector and pixel graphics, and allowed you to compose any number of effects like blurs, borders, shadows, bevels etc in a non-destructive stack.
Sketch was launched a few years later [2], and the way I remember it, it first focused more on vector art illustration on an infinite canvas. It was only later that DrawIt was retired while Sketch took over a lot of the UI/icon tools.
I always felt like the Sketch we have today is much more like the first version of DrawIt than the first version of Sketch.
I've always been upset about the fact that Adobe abandoned Fireworks. Fireworks always made sense to me when I had to cobble together graphics for my websites or apps. Adobe behaves like a company not interested in expanding their market, but just simply doubling down on it's existing cash cows until the day they become irrelevant.
Same here - Illustrator absorbed a lot of Fireworks features and offers decent optimised JPG/PNG/SVG exports for web, but over the last few years it's become excruciatingly slow while not really adding any new functionality.
Even with a 24 thread CPU and 1080Ti it drops frames constantly, even when the document contains just a single circle. It regularly hangs for a second or two when zooming or adding new shapes or text to the document. After Effects & Premiere are even slower for video editing and are the cause of much swearing in our office.
If Sketch and Figma can smoothly display 100+ populated screens with plenty of functionality then more power to them, we're definitely due competition in the graphics & video market.
Honestly they should have abandoned it earlier. Instead of building monoliths of legacy features/code they need to build full-on replacements every 5-10 years. I can't believe they're still actively developing Dreamweaver to this day.
OF course, there's still not a replacement for Fireworks because they just rolled it into one of their other legacy products. XD is still not great.
That's totally untrue. Adobe have made a humongous play into cloud/enterprise with acquisitions of digital marketing companies like Omniture and Day. They are now a very entrenched enterprise software vendor with Fortune 500s and that's way outside their creative offering. Look Adobe Marketing Cloud.
The article should have also covered Figma, as I expect it to chew a large chunk of Sketch's market share.
In my company almost every designer switched over from Sketch to Figma because of the collaboration and reviewing abilities. Designers invite developers (including remotes) to a read-only view on which they can place comments. This works really good.
Maybe Sketch Cloud offers the same? It didn't catch on at our place.
Not directly in Sketch, but our team uses Zeplin[0], which integrates with Sketch, for that use case. Our designers still prefer Sketch, and Zeplin has become an integral part of our workflow.
Yea, Figma is incredible. I love seeing all the designers' cursors moving around, and being able to ask questions directly on the art board. There have been many cases where I've been trying to line up some buttons only to have the designer come in and move them around as I'm writing code.
I also love the "infinite canvas" design, it feels great to have everything on one screen and just zoom in/zoom out to see details.
Figma would be impressive as a desktop app, but it’s even more impressive delivered through a browser. Just amazing engineering. I am continually amazed with how performant, reliable, and fast that browser-based graphics editor is. I forget I’m in the browser when I use it. Makes me excited for web assembly and the coming apps.
We switched from Sketch to Figma in our team and love it. The possibility to work several people simultaneously is amazing. A killer function. Today we were 4 people working within the same artboard at the same time on a complex search/filter page. Reusing and building on each others ideas in real time increases the overall speed of designing tremendously.
> Omvlee was very smart to target a large segment of the graphics sector’s largest, most powerful incumbent, as doing so created major tailwind for Sketch. Omvlee came to market with a differentiated product that was far better than even Adobe’s flagship product.
Great tip: just create something better than the household product for a large segment. Why did I never think of that....
What I really like about the Sketch story (correct me if I'm wrong), is that a small product-first focused company can make a big enough dent in an existing market. Kind of refreshing between all these marketing/sales-first VC fast growing in employee size companies with a bad fluff/action ratio.
Is it an existing market? I got the impression a lot of their work and success has been around prototyping mobile applications. This is a niche nobody served and grew quite quickly.
I think you could say it was a niche in an existing broader market, which had previously been covered by Illustrator and Photoshop. Sketch came along with a focused tool which did it better than the general-purpose tools. But it's not like UI protoyping was impossible before Sketch came along.
I think the part you quote is very poorly written. But from the rest of the article seems like the specific ways in which Sketch was "better" was by being cheaper and simpler, and catering to a motivated subset of users (the Mac design market).
> In the blog post announcing the move, Omvlee cited three reasons for his decision to abandon the Mac App Store in favor of direct sales: ... Apple’s insistence that desktop apps available through the Mac App Store be sandboxed for additional security, a stipulation that was impractical for Sketch.
I'm surprised by that. I'd have thought a user-document-based app like Sketch would be ideal for sandboxing.
Absolutely love Sketch. I got a license because I thought it would be useful for UI design, but have been using it for all sorts of other things until I've trained properly on it (such as room layout planning, etc). Looking forward to using it for UX design when I know it a little better (I'm not a designer), but I also think it could become my go-to SVG generator (from what I've browsed on training courses from Lynda and Pluralsight).
Adobe have been working on XD for ages and it still doesn't hold a candle to Sketch. It feels like it's born out of a scramble against Sketch, rather than from a deep desire to create the best interface design tool.
There was a gap in the market ever since they killed Fireworks, and if they were serious about filling it they could have done something years before Sketch became big, but instead they slapped a few ui-focused features onto Photoshop, sat back and called it a day.
Adobe is serious about XD, though. There were some decisions which in hindsight might've been suboptimal, let's say. So XD didn't move as fast as many expected. But I feel it's picking up speed. Did you use it recently? As I understand it, while it may not be better for everybody just yet, it definitely holds a candle to Sketch now.
Adobe lost about a year in feature development on XD when it ported it to Windows. They've picked it up since they've reached feature parity.
Also, XD is the spiritual successor to Fireworks. Its internal codename was "Sparkler" in reference to Fireworks.
To call XD a Photoshop they slapped UI features on does it a disservice. It's a completely new app built from the ground up specifically for UX/UI design.
Adobe is a powerful company and XD is gaining mind share pretty quickly and it is being heavily invested in. Thus it is a very serious threat to Sketch. At best case for Sketch it splits the market with Sketch in a few years.
It is hard to predict the future here. How nimble is Sketch? How nimble is Adobe?
Just last month we had our designers give a short demo of their new tools, and they compared Sketch with XD, and they went with XD. I know this is anecdotal (like everyone's comment is here), but considering the feedback they got from people they worked with when trialing in Sketch and XD, I'd have to say that XD impressed across the board, from designers to developers, more than Sketch did. And these are all people I respect.
So while I wouldn't bet on them having this in the bag just because they're Adobe, I would bet on it based upon the feedback I heard and the fact that Adobe does have the ability to throw more resources at it.
No, because the article it is how Sketch is supposed to be something that Adobe actually needs to worry about, given the worldwide desktop market share of macOS.
The overall desktop market share is not really relevant, if macOS has a disproportionate share of the designer market.
Which has always been the case. Adobe back when I checked, made something like half of its profits of Suite on the Mac.
John Nack (of Abobe) had commented on 2009:
"Last time I checked, Creative Suite sales were roughly 50/50 Mac/Win." [1]
So, the fact that Windows has more market share is irrelevant regarding whether Adobe should worry.
More relevant things would be:
1) designer share of macOS/Windows might have skewed since 2009 (but even at worst case I'd expect a 30-40% to still be on Macs).
2) Sketch alone just tackles Illustrator duties, not several other things the Suite does. So it wouldn't be enough for Adobe to lose Suite buyers over -- just people only using Illustrator.
But combined with newcomers like Affinity and co, it might.
I don't think Mac's share is declining -- it has grown in the overall laptop market.
What I think is their share of creative might have dropped slightly, as some have moved to Windows (e.g. Premiere using editors, and others finding Apple's Pro machines slow release pace and high prices for customizations to disk/memory bad).
Those designers would still be irrelevant for whether Adobe has to worry.
Obviously, whether Adobe has to worry from a competitor that's OS X only depends on the percentage of OS X vs Windows users buying Adobe's program.
If N% of Adobe's customers use OS X, then Adobe can still potentially lose up to N% of its users (the OS X using ones) to a competitor -- and whether there are tons of designers "living in countries where Apple hardware is out of reach" wont change this.
(Besides in many such countries most designers will just pirate Adobe stuff too, so they're neither Adobe nor Apple's customers to begin with).
I don't know what they use to build Sketch. Probably Cocoa. If they use Electron, Sketch can be used even in Linux. But then you would have some people complain about the performance. You can not make everyone happy! :)
But I think they can have the cake and eat it too if they use Qt. But the price of Qt library is quite steep (USD 5500 per year). I know, I know, you can use it freely if you use dynamic linking. But still....
They don't use Electron. Their website states that they don't plan to release Windows or Linux versions because of the large amount of native MacOS API's they use making it very time consuming and costly to make a cross-platform version of the app.
There's a third-party app for Windows called Lunacy [1] that can read/write Sketch files, so there must be a market large enough to make that worthwhile.
Quartz is mostly vector-based as well... OS X has very good support for vector graphics, it's rendering engine is basically a version of PDF-style rendering (like old NeXT used "display postscript").
There is also Figma, which is a direct competitor to sketch that is multiplatform, and they indeed run on electron (and even directly in browser). For me that's a great example of electron app done right, as you won't really notice any performance issues.
Wasn't there OmniGraffle on the Mac even before Sketch? Seemed to me in the beginning that Sketch was an exact clone of OmniGraffle with a little nicer interface. Sketch evolved a lot from that point on.
Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008
> We also know that Omvlee decided to monetize his product almost immediately. This wasn’t part of a larger revenue strategy; as a student, Omvlee was living a humble lifestyle and needed the [f]unds ...
An interesting case of something that was clearly started as a "lifestyle business", but then managed to grow quite organically, with no real need for 'institutional' involvement.
And today we have Adobe XD which is free. Actually I used it recently to open a .sketch file from a designer and it is the best free tool to open that files... what irony. Also a sign that Adobe really fears Sketch and now they are playing "here it is free" game :(
Right, but that's very different from "Adobe XD is free". You wouldn't call AWS "free", would you? (ok, this is an extreme difference, but for all we know, it's only a matter of time until the non-free versions become differentiated enough. It's not like Adobe doesn't know marketing)
Adobe feels like it's playing catch-up when it comes to apps optimised for UI design. Programs like Sketch and Figma address this area particularly well.
I'm just happy to see more alternatives in the design tools space and to see them thriving. Sketch, Figma, Affinity Designer are all some of the vector alternatives doing well. Affinity works on both Windows and Mac. They have a Photoshop alternative in their Photo app and soon a potential InDesign rival in their Publisher app.
Our small design firm has used Figma a few times on large apps with hundreds of screens, and we prefer it to Sketch.
It's smooth in the browser, although we use the desktop version which runs remarkably well on Electron. Files auto-save instantly and you can do all of the fancy animations and effects that Sketch offers.
The killer feature for us is inviting clients or other designers into the document whilst editing it in real-time like Google Docs. Clients can lock themselves to your viewport so you can talk them through the design (huge win for me, the clients love it), or they can browse around freely and edit the document if you allow them.
Figma launched in 2015 so they are relatively new. I don't know what their marketshare is but they definitely have 'mindhshare' among many designers (if that counts for something).
If you do an online search for "Sketch vs Figma" (or on YouTube) you'll find dozens of comparisons. Figma is browser-based which is a turn-off for many people (including me). However, sceptical reviewers have been won over by its features and the UI. So in the design tools space, they are definitely one to keep an eye on.
I've switched from Sketch to Figma, and I'm quite happy about it. I'm also using Affinity Designer, which is a fantastic complement to both.
But I'm odd—before Sketch, I used Antetype. I really miss the unique layout engine of that one, but the app fell into neglect and started lagging behind the competition in many aspects.
Edit: As it turns out, Antetype might be revived! [1]
It's an interesting problem for Adobe, obviously they have huge inertia behind their products, it's hard to change from a tool you have been using for a long time. On the other hand they are a big corporation that needs feeding, they can't afford to give away their main product.
It isn't just Sketch, there are a whole bunch of developers nipping away at their heels. Many of them offer quality products that are good enough, especially for new users.
I wouldn't bet on Adobe looking anything like it does now in ten or fifteen years time.
As many companies have discovered, it's better to cannibalize your own market share with your own new cheaper product than let other companies eat your market share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrMAzCHFUU&t=4m28s
From a tech perspective what’s the reason the Windows version of this is so allusive? Are there OS hooks that are so powerful on Mac that make a parallel development for windows an insurmountable task?
Sketch heavily uses macOS specific APIs for drawing, hardware acceleration, widgets, etc - I'd imagine Windows version would be a nearly complete rewrite with much higher subsequent development costs.
Which is interesting because Adobe XD also heavily uses MacOS specific API's and had to do a complete rewrite to support Windows. But Adobe has the manpower to do that.
I think it's just market demand. They have finite capacity to develop and they get more returns by investing in OSX than expanding to Windows. There's always Zeplin for sharing designs to Windows users.
I'm absolutely happy people are taking on Illustrator/XD. I was a freelance illustrator specializing in print while in college, and have grown dislike Illustrator.
The issues I'm having now with most design and vector art tools now are:
* No Offline Support
* No Linux Support.
That leaves us with... well, just Inkscape. Honestly it has gotten decent with the most recent version. We finally have an objects menu, after 5 years of development. But features are still behind Sketch, AI, and Affinity.
I'm well aware Linux users who are into drawing or design are a small minority, so I can't really complain.
Afaik that is still the case — they seem to have stuck with the web version. I used Gravit for a while, but they got bought by Corel and the application has gone from free to $100 for the "fully-featured" version (which given it's basically a beta and is missing what I consider key features, is a bit much). Akira [1] looks like it could possibly be the answer, but it's still a way off (though usable)
The article is completely focused on Adobe but Sketch's greatest competition moving forward is from the free-to-get-started Figma. Not one mention of that.
In fact the article kind of whiffs on this as it concludes that "Omvlee’s refusal to accept venture funding" was a "major driver of growth." Ehh.. really? Figma's funding has been a major factor in helping it do in a couple years what took Sketch a decade.
Sketch allows anyone more access to really fuck up a design. Looks good, some of the plugins/extensions are top notch but overall, it took the best of ideas from inDesign and Illustrator and bastardized it and somehow people believe it's better. It's different, it's new, but it's not better.
It's good for agencies and freelancers. We use it in corporate just to get the agencies to give us something better than a PDF.
I remember the buzz when Sketch 2 came out in 2012. Tons of us switched immediately. Whilst I think Sketch has stagnated since then, what it initially offered was a lightweight tool that was designed around the types of primitives we used as designers.
Most notably, CSS3 border radiuses were finally being supported, and doing them in Photoshop was awful. It was really simple stuff like that. It just felt right at the time.
"How Sketch Took on Adobe by Making a Faster, Leaner, Cheaper Image Editor, which is kind-of-useful for a very specific field -as long as it works properly- and leaving Adobe pretty much to be the standard for everything else (but catching up, see XD)"
Affinity is more of a threat to Adobe than Sketch.
At work only the design and video teams have Adobe licences as they're so expensive, even though image editing is a common task throughout the business. When I showed Finance that volume licensing fees for Affinity were less than £20/year for both Photo and Designer, they immediately got licences for the whole company.
The bulk of the design industry is in wealthy countries with an Apple presence.
But yes, there are professional designers who don't use Apple products. They're just not the majority in a global sense, but I'm sure they're the majority in some locales. Hell, there are still designers out there who don't even use a computer.
There exist a great one, which is called Figma. They use electron in combination with WebAssembly to make it fast. I'd say that's a pretty decent choice.
Well, the support is pretty decent in evergreen browsers (and it already was for a while), and in case of electron, you have precise control over your runtime, so it's not really a problem. Also many engines have already done quite substantial optimizations for handling wasm modules in combination with JavaScript. It's all done with backward compatibility in mind, so what works today will continue to do so.
Qt license is USD 5500 per user per year. For Sketch developer, this should not be an issue. But for some developers who bootstrap the cross-platform application, this might be an issue.
Also, C++ programmer is more expensive.
The cheaper option would be JavaFX. IntelliJ IDEA is one of good cross-platform application examples.
Sketch exists thanks to the genius of Quartz / Core Graphics. It does not have a rendering engine per se and struggles even with path ops [1].
This technical debt may soon be the end of Sketch. Because apart from Adobe, there is now Figma with smart people like Evan Wallace who can really "decide" [2][3].
With C++ core, Figma can go fully native [4], and it's puzzling why they have done this already.
[1] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194
[2] https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
[3] https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering...
[4] https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921