Sketch - A Better Kind of Normal
Early last year I wrote a post asking when will we see an application take Photoshop’s mantle as the UI designers tool of choice? When will we have something that just feels right when designing software and websites?
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about Sketch, the UI design app from Bohemian Coding. At the time I wrote that post, Sketch was at Version 1.X. I’d been using it on and off, but it was still quite basic, and also competing for attention with Bohemian Coding’s other graphic editing application, DrawIt.
About a week or so later Bohemian Coding discontinued DrawIt, opting instead to put their effort into Sketch, which already had the majority or DrawIt’s features. Sketch 2.0 was released not too long after, at which point I pretty much started using it full time. Twelve months on, and it finally looks like Photoshop has a serious contender to deal with.
There has been many posts of late talking about why designers are moving to Sketch (these are three of my favourites), but what makes me consider Sketch a real game changer is praise coming from non designers.
Sketch literally gave me the push I needed to go from a non-designing developer to a halfway decent designer. It’s really that good.
This comment is from Hacker News. That a design tool is the topic of conversion on a primarily development based news site is one thing, but to receive such praise from developers shows just what an intuitive application the folks at Bohenian Coding have come up with.
Indeed, I don’t think I’ve come across another graphics application that has been quite so easy to pick up. As it’s namesake suggests, Sketch feels more like an extension of my sketchbook than an ‘application’, and there’s nothing more satisfying than a tool that gets out of the way and just lets you do your thing.
As I wrote previously, it isn’t until something new comes along that we realise how bad thing were before. Were things that bad before? No, but 18 months ago I was ready for something better, and it took Sketch to show me just how much better they could be.