Sketch Reviews

Sketch has proven to be a very lightweight and easy-to-use program for designers, and we don't need a lot of processing power to run it. On the other hand, its simplicity of use and its ability to be widely interactive, anyone with design knowledge can use Sketch. Additionally, it can be our main platform when we talk about web design, mobile user interface creation, icon design and organizational branding, and almost anything we need.The layout of the tool and its functionalities are mainly focused on offering the best features to present the best web design and prototyping work. Sketch provides us with grids and an interface to keep our work very well structured, as well as options to customize the main screen based on our needs.

Sketch has a large number of users who have selected it for prototyping, design, and branding. However, its market is aimed at Mac users, so it is possible that some users cannot take advantage of this technology. On the other hand, Sketch can be used to the maximum by designers who specialize in the area of layout, prototyping, and branding, but for users who do not have experience in these areas, its adoption is a little more difficult.

Before the introduction, I was doing web design and application design (wire, mock) with other software, but after the release of Sketch, I changed completely. Compared to others, the cost of introduction can be reduced. Anyway, the operation is light and works smoothly.

People who are used to other programs will get stuck with shortcuts. There are many pretty excellent add-ons, but the administration is complicated

i like how it is possible to manage content & design. It's easy to re-use components / graphical elements in the document and between documents.

It's not always easy to export elements from a document (icons / components) as a frontend developer when the designer added many effects on it.

I used to design UI/UX in Adobe Photoshop and illustrator and it has all the features you need but it's too overwhelming and not ideal for quick Ui design. Using sketch feels much more polished and has only tools that you'll need for UI/UX design and not other unnecessary tools. It's much more simplified and quick to learn. No wonder Sketch is getting popular in UI/UX design community and its wide acceptance in the industry.

- Not for Windows users, that was really a bummer from the start.
I can't say it's a con but the sketch is not a tool for vector illustrations and photo editing. Sometimes when you need to edit the images that you are using in your design or illustration, you can't in Sktch. But you need to understand that it's not the purpose. Sketch is for just basic UI/UX or graphic design tools.
Another thing is maybe it was great to have some more features like has in Figma and how it has whole third party plugin supports etc. But as I said nothing major or a deal-breaker.

I like the use of symbols. This is crucial to being able to send out successfully to development and makes development time shorter.

I like that there are multiple pages that can be used. Really useful for building out different versions, keeping organised.

Although the symbols are one of the biggest pluses, they are also one of the core issues. They are 'clunky' and make it difficult to iterate quickly. In some ways, components in XD are better than Sketch (asides from there not being a separate page for them, and no ability to build an atomic structure) as they are more flexible. Often I will need to create 8 versions of the same card to accommodate for different instances (sold out, new, reduced, email me, description, no description, 3 lines of text, 2 lines of text etc...) which is very time consuming. XD allows you to do this well. Creating a symbol also no longer sends to symbol page as default which is annoying.

Images are one of the biggest bug bares. Images should be locked to scale with frame non locked, like in XD. This makes building responsive a lot quicker. Also just being able to drop in images rather than having to build components with different images as 5 layers down is a massive time hog.

File size is an issue. Very laggy and causes my Mac to crash often.

- Sketch was directly intended for UX people and was a first in the industry for that reason. You no longer had to use tools like Adobe Photoshop which had workarounds but were clearly not intended for UX designers.
- You don't have to keep paying for your account. You can purchase it once and keep using it (you just won't be getting the updates but still). They also have student discounts which is how I got started with it a couple of years ago.

- It only works on Mac. (They are working on adapting this but their [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] has a happily Mac-only approach which is not helpful.) Sketch is the reason I bought a Mac in the first place but it makes collaboration a challenge. I can use Sketch, but not necessarily the whole team.
- Speaking of collaboration... You could not collaborate simultaneously or even in general at all. This is again something they've been working on fixing but it's not great so far and there are better alternatives for this unfortunately.

My team and I primarily use Sketch to design and share projects using the Zeplin plugin for Sketch. The best thing about Sketch is the ability to add and customize an infinite number of plugins to tailor your workflow. The transition from Adobe products to Sketch was almost seamless, and the interface just makes sense.

The rendering and saving time in Sketch is a huge con. It takes at least five minutes to save a project with about 100 pages and then another 15 minutes to upload those designs to Zeplin. Sketch often uses way too much CPU and seizes up while saving.

I like the good old interface that is so universal that was probably adapted by all the other apps like figma, adobe xd

I don't like the fact that sometimes my design after unexpected turn off, just disappeared. It happened to me several times and I couldin't find the copy in the cloud nor anywhere else. It is very annoying.

Symbols and libraries - these are the core of Sketch's power. Dynamically updated components that allow individual customisations/overrides mean we don't have to have a million different variants of a given component. Colour tinting on symbol instances is a huge timesaver too, compared to the hacks and workarounds we used to have with layer styles and nested swatch symbols.
Export presets make asset export simple - I especially love the use of layer names to create folder structures for export. The SVG export gives better results than Adobe Illustrator for example (more decimal places means higher accuracy).
Pressing Enter or double-clicking to drill down within groups of elements is super useful - it'd be even better if there were keyboard shortcuts to cycle back and forth between the layers of a group (i.e. next/previous layer).
Plugins - there's a very active ecosystem of 3rd party developers, with tons of useful plugins to extend Sketch's functionality and make up for some of its limitations.

The vector editing tools feel very limited. For icon design I often find I have to jump to Adobe Illustrator to get the exact shapes I want. Illustrator's vector manipulation tools are both quicker and offer more granular control over various operations.
Since layer and symbol names are such a key aspect of asset export, I'd love to have built-in rule-based batch renaming features. The popular plugin RenameIt is great, but why not build this in?
The new team accounts are confusing and don't work well. The difference between signing in to an individual account vs a shared workspace isn't clear enough - do I need a serial number or a username and password? Myself and my teammates have had multiple issues with being signed out and getting lost in authentication hell, which immediately cuts us off from our files.

I am writing this review from the perspective of a Product Manager who uses Sketch to view designs for myself and my team. In that capacity it has been a great tool! The UI is very intuitive and easy to navigate around. I find myself making small updates to designs frequently, and Sketch makes this easy even for a novice such as myself. Their Sketch cloud tool is constantly improving. Every time I login I find a new feature that wasn't there before. The cloud functionality makes it a breeze to share designs to some team members who do not have a Sketch license. We have been using Sketch for 3 years at my company and I don't foresee that changing any time soon.

It can be a bit expensive getting each team member a Sketch license. This used to be a big problem at my company, but since Sketch improved upon their Sketch cloud tool we found the need for developers to have Sketch licenses to have dropped dramatically. So if your team can use the free cloud tool to view designs, it could save you a lot of money on licenses for non designers.

the best features of sketch is we can create vector artwork and then import it to make digital devices prototypes , we can scale up the projects and collaborate with our team members using sketch, it is an industry standard tool which is used to create professional designs for digital devices, like web or mobile design. it has all the features that is required for a design tool. we can add multiple plugins and it can handle bigger projects easily.

there is not much of drawback using sketch but it is a bit costly for business and also the files created a larger than expectations so it tends to slow down the device sometimes apart from that it does its job very well.

I bought Sketch when it first came out, and I remember thinking, "Wow. A design app that actually looks visually appealing!"

I was used to Adobe products, which are high-quality, but still look like they were developed 10 years ago.

Everything in Sketch is well-organized and intuitive—I had no problem jumping in and designing a landing page in a few minutes.

I like that it's paired more closely with web development (pinning objects to an edge, responsive sizing, etc), and symbols are a pretty convenient way to make your designs more modular.

The icon toolbar is highly useful, as well. I like that you can customize 100% to your needs.

I wish Sketch would move even closer to web development in the sense of being able to define global padding sizes, grids, etc.

I think the organization of Symbols could be improved to accommodate large libraries.

After all of the needed plug-ins are installed, the software is decent at creating interactive prototypes and illustrations for designing software. It is incredibly simple to install, as are all Mac products, and offers modest import functionality for other non-native file formats.

Sketch is still very reliant upon third-party plug-ins to handle (what should be native) tasks well. The fact that Sketch is Mac only makes it very limited in usage in corporations with mixed Mac/PC environments. Since macOS cannot be virtualized on a PC, and there is no PC version, more adoption of Sketch requires capital expenditure requests for Macs. Compared to almost any other tool in this space, which is either web based or multiplatform, I don't understand why Sketch is so trendy.