Sketch: From 1 to One Million users

I can't overstate how revolutionary Sketch was when it came out.

We were a small webdev shop and were pretty early adopters. Back then it was standard practice for designers to work in Photoshop and hand over full website designs in flat .png format. Us devs would then struggle to convert those designs into HTML and CSS templates pretty much by eye.

Sketch changed all this.

1. The price. We got early licences for something crazy like £35. This meant it was possible for all of the devs to have a licence even if we were only using it to consume files created by the designers. There is no way we could afford this with Adobe.

2. Because the developers were viewing the designs in app we could inspect and get exact values for things like spacings, colors and fonts. I can't describe how hard it is to get exact font, font size & font weight by eye if you don't come from a design background.

3. At some point they added the ability to just right click something and export the style as CSS. This was never good enough to just paste into your stylesheet but by using it as a base sped up development massively.

4. It was built for the web and mobile. All the designers I worked with came from a print background so it made sense their tool suite of choice was Adobe. I can't get my head around how they designed websites in Photoshop for so many years.

5. The interface was incredibly simple and intuitive. If you remember it, contrast how simple the 3D software SketchUp was compared to say Blender. As a developer I've never invested time to learn Photoshop but Sketch you know after 10 minutes of playing with. I still use it today for my hobby projects.

Partly because of 5 I get a little irritated when they add new features. I've seen this happen with so much software. You earn some money and hire some developers and so it follows you have to add features to keep them busy. I'd be over the moon if they just said "we're going to have a feature freeze for two or three years while we work on developing the simplest most intuitive interface possible for doing complex SVG manipulations"

This is copied from https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/22/from-one-to-one-milli..., which breaks the site guidelines:

"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wish Sketch was available for Windows or Linux. I don't think I'll buy a Mac ever again. More and more people are moving away from Apple altogether as the ecosystem has become an inescapable walled garden. I think ARM will become that last nail in the "walled garden" coffin.