How Sketch Took on Adobe
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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
I think it was simply because of developer convenience: https://www.sketchapp.com/support/requirements/other-platfor...
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!
I do work on a design product and my first target platform is the browser. Cheers ;)
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.
* Anecdote, YMMV
Sketch became a good enough default very quickly, but there are starting to be several competitors that are just as good if not way better.
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.
They also allow you to install it in as many machines as you like. Sketch forces you to buy a license for each of your computers.
I just don't want to subscribe to software.
"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!"
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
That’s about a day or two worth of billable work for the cheapest employee.
And even without those points, Adobe's pricing is just off from other professional tools.
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.
That doesn’t count the money I spend money on Udemy and soon hosting costs for side projects.
$60 a month to do your job is not that much. I’m not even making money from the money I’m spending, that’s just to keep up with technology.
Adobe's pricing is just in line with most professional software. AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Vectorworks all cost a similar amount of 1000s of dollars.
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.
Of course they don't give you a cheaper way to only buy Lightroom which is the annoying part.
So - no.
I can't wait to finish this job and purge my Mac
Photoshop is amazing and I use it daily, but my goodness does it creak.
There's a lot of valid points that can be criticized about GIMP. Speed is not one of them.
Loading my VM is faster than loading any Adobe products.
Adobe is getting dragged down by its own legacy code which would be a dead end like Windows or IE.
Ditched my subscription and started using PhotoPea.com. Same UI, no costs. For my lightweight use, it's perfect.
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.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemi...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemi...
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.
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.
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.
[0] - https://zeplin.io
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.
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.
So classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff, really.
I'm surprised by that. I'd have thought a user-document-based app like Sketch would be ideal for sandboxing.
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.
I give it a try every time there's a major update, hoping that this time it'll be good. There's always something which makes me go 'not today'.
For example the recent voice prototyping features are an interesting gimmick, but I'd rather they solve some of the basic stuff first.
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.
It is hard to predict the future here. How nimble is Sketch? How nimble is Adobe?
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.
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.
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).
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).
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....
Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html
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.
Thats it. Otherwise, functionality is the same.
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.
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 should have more market share IMO.
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.
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]
What's wrong with it?
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.
Said from a windows ubuntu tech shop
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.
Is that still the case now?
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.
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.
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)"
Which outside SV and first world countries isn't quite true.
Might still be enough for Sketch to keep an healthy business but hardly enough to actually hit Adobe's business line.
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.
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.
I'm not sure why this took such a pointed turn.
Where getting a mac mini might mean an imported device from somewhere else, and three to four months salary.
We are on HN, you can easily find them.
Question for cross platform experts:
If today, you were to create an app supporting Linux, Windows, Mac - which toolkit/framework we must use?
Adobe XD, InVision Studio (soon on Windows), Figma (in browser), Framer (soon on Windows).
edit - though it did get borked by a brew update and I had to add a different source to brew to get it back up, so is not that sane admittedly.
Also, C++ programmer is more expensive.
The cheaper option would be JavaFX. IntelliJ IDEA is one of good cross-platform application examples.