I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
You could also get a constraints plugin for Sketch. That’s built-in on Figma.
No before the current iteration there was Fireworks, then the smaller web apps for wireframe prototyping (Balsamiq, etc).
Professional Designers used inDesign for bigger portals or complex and vast UIs. Or AI for the prototypes.
Photoshop lacked good vector tools and comprehensive styling of corpus.
At my former app dev agency, the design team stayed on Sketch + inVision until Figma was already very well established.
- Design sharing was great and easy, yeah. - Autolayout easily won over folks who didn't wanna learn Sketch - Sketch was moving too slow at a critical time, leaving a lot of ground uncovered for Figma to jump in
But most important:
It was free.
I know that I'm in a small/medium European company (~400 people total), generally very mindful of how we spend money but this is the exact billing model that would turn us away because too expensive for the features actually used.
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.
The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.
I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.
I loved that tool