Sketch 3: A Powerful and Simple Tool for Digital Designers
Sketch is made purely for digital designers who heavily design websites, mobile UI, icons and other similar products. Unlike Photoshop and Illustrator, that are bulky with bloated and unnecessary tools (and not to mention expensive!), Sketch comes as a blessing in disguise with a clean and airy workspace.
Benefits
To start with, Sketch has pre-defined templates for responsive websites, iOS and Material Design that make it easy to start any new project, whether web or mobile.
The best part of this tool is that it’s all 100% vector. With Retina displays and responsive designs gaining huge popularity, re-designing your app to adapt to each screen does not make sense. Sketch takes care of that. You can do infinite zooming and export assets with perfect layer styles in multiple resolutions. Exporting assets has never been easier.
You can export a single layer, layers with groups, or even an entire artboard. The user has the option of exporting in multiple sizes and formats simultaneously and sending directly to email, Facebook, Twitter or simply saving to a folder.
Sketch embraces CSS logic. All the properties that you use on your designs (like shadows, borders, gradients) are possible on CSS whereas on Photoshop you can go crazy setting up the lighting, textures, bevel and emboss and other properties which don’t work well in CSS and are unnecessary requirements in UI design (and if they need to be used, you always end up creating a png file to be used in your website or app). You can also directly copy the CSS attributes to your code, although it’s rough-in but worth it.
For Sketch users, there are a lot of great resources and articles. There are tons of plugins which can be used to make your life easy (Github has a good collection of plugins) all written in CocoaScript. The plugins are easy to install and can also be easily removed.
Cons
If you use the Sketch tool heavily, you may come across the problem where the app becomes sluggish and artboards and designs disappear for a while. Sometimes, when overworked, the app crashes or freezes the computer and you end up having to restart.
Additionally, it feels that some tools are missing – like direct selection – and the rulers and guides could also use some work. Creating guides takes some time by clicking on the rulers whereas in Photoshop and Illustrator you just need to drag from the rulers. Hiding guides will also hide the ruler, which sometimes becomes frustrating.
Another thing that is missing is the glyph table, which is pretty handy to insert special characters in your design.
The app can become sluggish at times, especially with larger files containing complicated shapes, and it often crashes. Although when restarted, you can continue where you left off without getting panicky (unlike its Adobe counterparts).
Final Thoughts
Sketch is a powerful tool to create awesome designs for the digital world. It’s easy and anyone can use it whether you are starting in the industry or have twenty plus years of experience. It’s cheap with one-time purchase and no upgrade price.
It still feels that it requires a bit more work but compared to Adobe products, which are almost two decades old, the team who created Sketch have created a powerful tool for web and mobile UI design.