Sketch Reviews

I am writing this review from the perspective of a Product Manager who uses Sketch to view designs for myself and my team. In that capacity it has been a great tool! The UI is very intuitive and easy to navigate around. I find myself making small updates to designs frequently, and Sketch makes this easy even for a novice such as myself. Their Sketch cloud tool is constantly improving. Every time I login I find a new feature that wasn't there before. The cloud functionality makes it a breeze to share designs to some team members who do not have a Sketch license. We have been using Sketch for 3 years at my company and I don't foresee that changing any time soon.

It can be a bit expensive getting each team member a Sketch license. This used to be a big problem at my company, but since Sketch improved upon their Sketch cloud tool we found the need for developers to have Sketch licenses to have dropped dramatically. So if your team can use the free cloud tool to view designs, it could save you a lot of money on licenses for non designers.

I love Sketch and use it as my main app design tool. While there is a bit of a learning curve, I think it's worth investing the time to learn Sketch, particularly if you're designing user experiences and interfaces for mobile apps. The ability to create and use templates and components makes it extremely versatile. Also, the design tools, symbol libraries, and editing features make Sketch the best UX/UI design app I've ever used. Further, you can add plugins to add capabilities to Sketch. I use several. One of these allows me to export a design as code directly into Xcode! This saves time when coding a new UI.

There's little I don't like about Sketch. The only thing I could think of needing improvement is in creating gradients in the Appearance section of the Inspector. While this is extremely powerful, I find it a bit confusing at times.

I liked the focus they put on UI design, with lots of templates available in the community, with specific toolsets that were think with UI and somehow also UX in mind (prototyping). I really liked the versioning new feature that came out for Sketch cloud, although I would like to have it for free for personal uses without collaborators.

It's hard to make illustrations when coming from other softwares that I used to use from Adobe, and for project that are not related to Mobile or Web doesn't look that easy for me to use or achieve my design projects.

You can feel the robustness of the software. It is quick, but at the same time you can feel how it was built with intent. The UI sets the standard of similar design tools and gets constant updates which lead to more productivity and ease of use.

The ability to collaborate on a project is limited. There is a Sketch Cloud, but generally it is no match for other on-line design tools.

My team and I primarily use Sketch to design and share projects using the Zeplin plugin for Sketch. The best thing about Sketch is the ability to add and customize an infinite number of plugins to tailor your workflow. The transition from Adobe products to Sketch was almost seamless, and the interface just makes sense.

The rendering and saving time in Sketch is a huge con. It takes at least five minutes to save a project with about 100 pages and then another 15 minutes to upload those designs to Zeplin. Sketch often uses way too much CPU and seizes up while saving.

Sketch is one of the best-designed apps I've ever used (going back 30 years) and it's still a joy. Built from the ground up for UI work, not repurposed like Photoshop or Illustrator. Everything just works, and the plug-in community has a solution for everything.

Sketch hasn't remained competitive with other products - not so much as a UI toll which it excels at, but prototyping which they never really figured out and relied on other products like Invision to complete

Sketch was the revolutionary software that introduced UI/UX and visual designers with a tool created for that specific task which is creating interfaces. The vector graphic software doesn't limit you there; you are able to create posters, logos or even billboards with its intuitive and easy to learn clean interfaces. The toolbars consist of the standard functions and operators which you usually find in such software. The power of Sketch is beyond the limitations of your own imagination I would say. The symbols feature allows you to create reusable visual components which come in handy when designing multiple interfaces of a product or an app. Going a bit further, these features allow designers to create design languages and design systems very easily as well. There are hundreds of plugins that could be used to further ease the workflow. Sketch also integrates with other tools like Invision (prototyping) and Abstract (version control) which allows the creation of an ecosystem for the designer.

Sketch in recent years has got multiple competitors like AdobeXD and Figma which sometimes make Sketch fall behind the race in terms of features and functionality. Learning from the failures of Sketch, the competitor products always try to provide better value for money while optimising the workflows for the designer. Major updates from Sketch at most instances lately have been extremely buggy which sometimes even took weeks for them to release a patch. Sketch is only available on Mac which also limits the cross-platform support, unlike its competition. If you are designing a product that has multiple artboards (50+), Sketch tends to become laggy and resource-consuming even on the latest i7 Mac with 16GB of RAM.

Here's the short list of why I'll never go back to adobe & always use Sketch
1)Command Keys - I LOVE that I don't have to remember crazy key commands to create simple things like textboxes and shapes. In sketch T creates a textbox, O a circle, R Rectangle! So easy to remember!
2) File Size - I can have HUNDREDS of designed screens in a single file and it doesn't take forever to load! The only time I've ever had a problem was with multiple massive photos in a file and still, that was nothing in compared to other programs
3) Symbols - I love not recreating the same button over and over. And that it's easy to create symbols and also change small things with text override. Helps a ton with consistency!
4) Saving! I love auto-save and if I accidentally deleted something I decided I like the revert ability is awesome! I can't tell you the nightmares I had in college because I forgot to save!
5) Plugins - There is an awesome community around this product and they create great tools to make my life even easier!

It's great they are always trying to stay up-to-date on the latest and best but as they find better ways to do things it sometimes messes up things like symbols and UI Kits which means rework to match the new functionality.

Sketch feels purposeful, like the creators knew there was a hole in the design market that needed a way to do both wire framing and high fidelity mock-ups with ease and the flexibility of Illustrator. Right when you think Adobe's "next big update" is going to make Sketch obsolete, Sketch comes out with the next wave of features, improvements, and 3rd party plugins that just remind you why you've stayed for so long.

The only con I can think of is compatibility between how Sketch renders vectors with how Adobe uses it. For the most part, you don't have many issues. But once in a while you'll work with some "old school" team that sends you an Adobe file containing assets for your UI project that you'd rather open in Sketch. Then you do, and it's hit or miss. However, a good designer has Adobe, can clean it up and make it usable in Sketch with a little expert know-how.

How seamlessly SK integrates with invision, the workflow is flawless. I love how sketch (unlike Adobe) really emphasized integrating with 3rd party software. Just create the web comp in sketch, synch it with invision and watch how all the assets flow into your project, along with invision inbuilt ability to create a prototype out of your design and let team members comment it, it's truly the best web design work flow I've seen.

No direct selection. It drove me crazy, that objects are can't be easily selected and manipulated like they can be in PS/AI. And god help you if try to import any vectors back into illustrator. (crazy nonsensical shapes). Which means the only way to establish a coherent work flow with illustrator, is AI into sketch—never the other way around.

A great point in favor, was that we use this program from the information architecture, so the compatibility is ideal, the best thing in web design is that it has an automatic grid system that is very easy to handle. The two previous functions facilitate unexpected changes and corrections, since when changing an element is automatically updated throughout the site. The files are very light, they can be exported in PDF, PNG and JPG, even at twice the size, since when working with vectors, there is no danger of pixelation of the elements. Multiple artboards can be used in different sections. This allows you to develop all the templates of a device in one section and thus have your pages divided according to format. Shape elements, such as a rectangle, are used with the same logic as CSS, so when moving to front you can easily copy the styling.

It exists only for OS X Mac, which means that all the equipment I work with must use this operating system.
It is not good for image editing. It has some basic tools, but to define a style you have to use another editing program first.
It is not possible to go back one step when modifying a style, you have to go back to the latest version, so it is necessary to constantly save the changes.

Sketch's ease of use is by far its best quality. With a low learning curve, a user can go from firing up the software for the first time to completing a high quality mockup in a really short time. It has none of the intimidation you feel when starting to use an Adobe product whether its Illustrator or Photoshop. In that regard, it's a lot more similar to Apple's Keynote, which had become my mockup tool of choice until I discovered Sketch, which can accomplish much more in a shorter period of time.

The latest 52.0 release that introduced Dark Mode, also brought slowdowns for large documents. Speed was supposed to be one of the hallmarks of the release, but I've experienced the opposite, with one of my larger documents taking quite a while before it opens on my Macbook Pro.

I bought Sketch when it first came out, and I remember thinking, "Wow. A design app that actually looks visually appealing!"

I was used to Adobe products, which are high-quality, but still look like they were developed 10 years ago.

Everything in Sketch is well-organized and intuitive—I had no problem jumping in and designing a landing page in a few minutes.

I like that it's paired more closely with web development (pinning objects to an edge, responsive sizing, etc), and symbols are a pretty convenient way to make your designs more modular.

The icon toolbar is highly useful, as well. I like that you can customize 100% to your needs.

I wish Sketch would move even closer to web development in the sense of being able to define global padding sizes, grids, etc.

I think the organization of Symbols could be improved to accommodate large libraries.

Lots of free plugins available to extend functionality.
Lots of free libraries available for common elements.
Easy to learn initially, the controls are intuitive for the most part.
Cn edit text in a symbol without having to make separate versions of the symbol - very cool.
Can make polished high-fidelity prototypes with Sketch.

Available only for iOS devices.
Can't add text within an element- must add text as a separate element.
Not ideal for rapid low-fidelity prototyping.
Can't create itneractions between elements or users mouse.

the best features of sketch is we can create vector artwork and then import it to make digital devices prototypes , we can scale up the projects and collaborate with our team members using sketch, it is an industry standard tool which is used to create professional designs for digital devices, like web or mobile design. it has all the features that is required for a design tool. we can add multiple plugins and it can handle bigger projects easily.

there is not much of drawback using sketch but it is a bit costly for business and also the files created a larger than expectations so it tends to slow down the device sometimes apart from that it does its job very well.