Sketch raises $20M in Series A funding
techcrunch.com
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A few years later Sketch came along and it was so easy and intuitive to use that I was able to pick it up immediately. I've been able to get pretty good at UX design now because the barrier to entry on the tools side got so much lower.
I wonder if there's a way to lower the barrier to entry for coding in the same way. I mean, when you think about it, we're still using text editors to build software. Seems odd.
Anyway, Sketch is awesome and the first of this new wave of design tools. I use Figma now. It has most of the benefits of sketch and it supports Mac, Windows and in browser. I fear this funding may have come too late.
It’s what got me working on Retool (https://tryretool.com). The idea is that visual programming has a bad rap, primarily because it’s being used in the wrong places. Most people try to apply visual programming to end-user software (Twitter, Airbnb, etc.). But because visual programming is really good for getting to an 80% solution in 20% of the time, and because 80% of Twitter really isn’t good enough (imagine Twitter with no autocomplete for tagging other users), building customer-facing software is precisely visual programming’s worst use case!
Retool’s focused specifically on building internal software. The idea is that, for internal software, 80% literally is 80%. And so visual programming is particularly suited for building internal stuff. Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://vimeo.com/303811211. (People have described it as Delphi or Visual Basic in the cloud. In this case, the cloud is actually helpful, since it lets you distribute the created apps easily with authentication, authorization, and audit logs.)
If anybody has any feedback, or otherwise wants to hypothesize on why we’re still programming in text editors, please let me know! I’m david@.
Programmers might dislike visual programming because you give up a lot of control, but artists have a far easier time using them than writing "const int x = foo", etc since they have to basically learn a whole new language/subject matter.
On that note, I think anything that isn't particularly algorithm heavy and visual could enable a different class of people (like designers and artists) to access the utility of programming logic without having to learn a whole new language and paradigm of thinking. Who knows, maybe in the future, front-end ui work might be done by designers using a "photoshop-for-interfaces" software rather than programmers writing react components.
We had HyperCard > Flash > Visual Basic > Delphi. None of those got any traction in the field because Computer technology popularity are dependent on Companies using them.
Computer Programming languages, or in fact most of the Technology Tools are Top to Bottom design. Google, IBM, Apple, Microsoft design tools that fits them, and people start using it. Do you really need k8s? I bet 80% of uses cases could do without it. Instead of bottom up design that is like Excel, everybody uses it all the way up to investment banks. It serves the need for 80%, or arguably 90%+ of number crushing uses cases.
But for me k8s solves lot of problems, make deployment reliable, faster, infrastructure in code and these things. Other than k8s, haven't seen faster way of deployment on scale. IMO canary deployment style in istio is just the way deployment should be done. I find k8s great piece of software, still lots of apis need to be in GA, but still I found and see k8s a great piece of future.
Here's a short demo: https://youtu.be/Yi0BjSM3v4w
It eliminates weeks and months of tedious design to code conversion and you can build sophisticated SaaS applications, content-rich pages, and e-commerce portals much faster.
It might help designers who're interested in understanding how their design translates into code because they can instantly see the underlying code for each design, play around with it, and see how it changes.
In your tool an anti pattern that I found was that it seems to use inline styles and css class names of sort 'font-normal' 'text-gray1', etc. That's unmaintainable for large code base.
On the other hand having `copy CSS attributes` contextual menu item in Sketch is super productive. I can choose my own class name and whatsoever and still have the exact styles as the designer wanted them to be.
Actually lots of companies use micro classes. I first learned about it using Tachyons and built a full compliance platform. It’s good because you don’t need to worry about unintended visual changes and bad because you can’t make large style changes without lots of effort.
`text-gray1` means what? Which library am I supposed to use in order to make this stylesheets work? Does it match tachyons or tailwind - no. So I have to add X lines of CSS to my project coming from a tool that I am not able to use once I change a simple class name? Not a good start.
The software also can generate BEM like you wish for in the future. One of our earlier iterations did do that, but the default stack today is Tailwind which I've found to be the second best way to approach CSS (the first is CSS-in-JS, but with explicit design scales).
BTW I took a look at your CodeGen project, and I'm impressed.
Is it really odd, though? UI design is inherently a visual activity - it makes sense to me to have a graphical tool like Sketch to use.
Whilst I sometimes use class hierarchy or control flow graphs to help me visualise a codebase, I feel that the medium of text is more efficient to write in (if you've ever seen one of those block-based coding tools often used in education, you'll know how painful it is to make something non-trivial by dragging and dropping blocks).
And it's not like we haven't seen innovation in the developer tooling space - nobody is using notepad to write serious code. JetBrains in particular have made a whole suite of tools which actually understand the code you're writing and suggest improvements, allow you to easily perform refactorings etc - it's far, far more than just a text editor. Today, I won't use a programming language without a JetBrains IDE/plugin.
- wire-framing
and
- demoing prototypes with transitions on my phone (specially this)
?
I am about to jump the wagon of design (product owner & ceo doing stuff on power point copy paste or balsamiq) and i do not have time to have multiple tools, i want just one.
Figma on browser + collaboration seems nice to test.
Amongst other things designers also use our generated code to learn how designs can be viewed in browsers as HTML/CSS.
When Sketch introduced Symbols, they started making designers think like developers, in the sense of reusable self-contained components. This makes our and companies like us live easier. And for that we thank them :)
An as for whether they are scalable, the new ones might be. I remember reading about a company, from somewhere in the middle East, using them to build hospital IT systems, which are usually very complex.
Link: https://www.outsystems.com/blog/introducing-sapphire-hospita...
A few years back, the Sketch founder made a convincing case in interviews for why the product is better off when they’re bootstrapped... This turn of events suggests they might be feeling the heat from well-funded competitors like Figma and Invision.
If they don’t act now, fast, they will soon become irrelevant.
No, that's not the icing on the cake. That's the primary reason for why design teams are switching to Figma. This changes so much, you wouldn't believe: primarily because it means effectively side-stepping version control pains. With Sketch you either have to use external software (Abstract, Plant etc.) or resort to manual “check-outs” while working in design team. With Figma this problem simply doesn't exist.
I'm for sure hoping that the web move isn't a step in ditching the Mac app. But perhaps the actual users of Sketch don't care, Figma is mostly a web app right?
Sketch also can’t do much more design-wise than you can with HTML and CSS, a good thing as it’s too easy to put things into a design with photoshop or illustrator that are a pain to implement.
The file format is basically zipped json files, so there’s a robust plugin ecosystem and you can do things like git integration pretty easily. And it’s a native Mac app, unlike Figma, its closest competitor, which is Electron.
It’s an example of simpler is better, especially when compared to Adobe software which doesn’t just include the kitchen sink, but the kitchen, the house and a large part of the street.
On the other hand, it's a poor replacement for actual HTML and CSS as a flexible prototyping medium, and limits the visual possibilities for the parts that are not tied to CSS's constraints (e.g. icons, illustrations, backgrounds).
(From my admittedly short experience, Figma limits them even further, to the point that the only visual language you can accomplish with it is similar to Figma's own branding guidelines.)
Both are vector apps, but Illustrator skews more for, well, illustration and icon design, although you can use it for UI design. (You can also use Sketch for icon design too.)
Additionally, Sketch has a massive collection of plugins that forms a large part of it's appeal.
Adobe XD is Adobe's direct competitor to Sketch for UI design and for once, they are playing catch-up in terms of "mindshare" among designers. Making Adobe XD free in May 2018 was clearly an attempt by Adobe to accelerate the growth of their user base.
There are other competitors, notably Figma which is gaining a lot accolades and more users. Unlike Sketch, Figma runs in the browser which means you can use it on Windows and Mac (they have Electron-based desktop apps too). Sketch is Mac-only.
There is also Affinity Designer (Windows and Mac) - a vector drawing app which has a mixture of illustration tools (e.g. brushes) and more UI-focused features (symbols, constraints). However, Affinity Designer users seem to skew more towards illustration rather than UX design, so I would say they are probably not in the same race as Adobe XD/Sketch/Figma. Affinity Designer is a native app with no subscription model.
Overall, the more choice and competition in the design space is a good thing, particularly given Adobe's dominance. It's also nice to see apps adopt different UI approaches to tools - rather than copy the clunky way Adobe apps perform tasks.
And Linux. And BSDs. And Plan9? And Haiku? Probably ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Arch user here and so appreciative that Figma exists.
I love that you used the term DRY to describe the design process Sketch enables - it never occurred to me, but it's exactly the same principle. Going back to Illustrator or Photoshop after Sketch is the UI design equivalent of copying and pasting the same code block over and over instead of writing a function or a class.
The app’s name notwithstanding—it was likely a poor choice—I don’t think Sketch was ever designed to do these things.
It's kind of a simpler Illustrator but you run into limitations quickly.
It's great for UI mockups, quick things etc..
80% of design work I think is 'sketching' 'conceptual' - you don't need a full suite for that.
It's accessible to the long tail of folks who don't need to go for a bigger solution.
It's all about how it operates, feels, etc., not that it does something profoundly different.
Figma is eating their lunch. It does what Sketch does & much much more - in the browser.
I moved from Sketch to Adobe XD to Figma. Not going back.
I'm not sure if any other apps can make use of .fig files so you may well still be tied to the app in that sense but you can at least own/archive your working files.
Then why bother raising $20M? Isn't that amount a bit small compared to what they already made in yearly profit?
I can save a solid 40K a year in savings on a 120K salary, that doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't get a 20K loan to help with a significant expense.
They already stated that the 20MM is meant to accelerate their development of a web version. That's why they raised this money.
Philosophically I find it odd to use a closed system which only runs on Mac to build experiences for web. Something about it rubs me wrong.
Mac market share https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...
Had they started out cross platform it’s doubtful they’d been able to achieve what they did when they did.
https://www.sketchapp.com/support/requirements/other-platfor...
For example, how much more valuable would Sketch be as a company and to society if it were available on more platforms than just Mac OS?
Though I do think the server-side doesn't need to be shipped. I have most of my web apps as simple "Web clips", which are basically bookmarks that open in a window.
A great sustainable comfortable product company. But its a developer tool, so of course we will get endless competitors products. So we need capital. So VC are now in a position to offer offers. And we get a bloodbath ?
See their official announcement: https://blog.sketchapp.com/sketch-raises-20m-in-series-a-fun...
As an aside, really like having it native, main reason why I haven't switched to Figma.
It’s a MacOS app because it takes advantage of specific MacOS frameworks that allow it to feel like a quality and ‘native’ piece of software.
We have different operating systems for different purposes. Many designers like to use a Mac anyway. They decided to fill that niche.
Ports would mean massive, fundamental rewrites of huge chunks of the application’s infrastructure.
Lunacy is a good windows alternative to Sketch!
I'm having to keep an old Mac Mini around just to run Sketch. I'd gladly pay for a new Ubuntu license
I'm not a fan of not having access to a tool just because the internet is down.
I just hope they don’t go to mandatory annual fee model.
I really dig how Balsamiq has the ability to share spaces and all of that, so if Sketch can build a platform to natively share designs back/forth + collaborate (Google Drive + Avocode esque) that’s a huge win.
[1]: https://blog.sketchapp.com/versioning-licensing-and-sketch-4...
I'm using Sketch now and find it to be very good. There are a lot of great features in Sketch that don't exist in Fireworks and I've been slowly getting better and better with it. I have a difficult switching tools, especially something like Fireworks that I had been using for about 15 years, maybe even longer!
What I miss in Sketch is the ability to do non-UI work effectively. Fireworks almost sits in the middle of Photoshop and Sketch. You could even do some light vector work in there, all while eliminating the massive confusion newbs have when opening up Photoshop or Illustrator.
Unfortunately, the last Mac laptop I had died (it was quite old), so I only have a Windows laptop at the moment. I haven't made the switch to Sketch yet as a result.
Sketch seems heavily used for UI/UX designs/mockups, but do you find it as good for just individual image construction/building tasks? Or is it better for the overall layout, flow, mockup and design workflow?
I'm finding it hard to explain what it was about Fireworks that felt so right to me - there were times I could get an interesting image built that was both vector and bitmap, very quickly. Sometimes, I think it was the accessibility of the tools offered, it just had the right combination for what I spent most of my time doing (graphics for web/digital, that could move in or out of the print world if needed since it could be vector, sometimes whole layouts/designs, other times just detail work or piecemeal work).
$100 per year no matter what! That's mind boggling! Congrats to the team for making a useful app.
As a result of its incredible popularity, too many other companies with larger war chests have started to compete against it head to head - Adobe XD - Invision Studio - Figma Every single one of them allows you to import sketch files.
Bohemian has made a lot of money for its founders already. Now it needs to stay in the game.
Personally I wish Adobe released a new version of Fireworks or a version of Illustrator with less illustration features. I tried XD and didn't love it either.
So many little things - selection into layers, resizing groups, etc. etc. - all of it feels 'off'.
Illustrator, I think is plain superior it's just considerably more expensive.
Given that Sketch has not changed that much in the last few years, I can't fathom what's going on.
And the lack of Windows support ...