
How Sketch Took on Adobe - pmp301
https://producthabits.com/how-sketch-took-on-adobe-by-making-a-faster-leaner-cheaper-image-editor/
======
vladdanilov
> Omvlee decided to design his application to run natively on OS X. This was
> very smart. Although Omvlee could have reached a considerably wider audience
> by designing Sketch for Windows (or OS X and Windows), focusing on the Mac
> market was highly strategic

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](https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892358827378696194)

[2] [https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-
to...](https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-
web/)

[3] [https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-
rendering...](https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering-on-
the-gpu-c3f4d782c5ac)

[4]
[https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921](https://twitter.com/evanwallace/status/673959396104273921)

~~~
on_and_off
There is also Affinity Designer.

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.

~~~
arvinsim
Affinity Designer is also does not have the psuedo subscription style that
Sketch uses.

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.

~~~
CharlesW
I'm glad you mentioned this. There are many reasons why I'm no longer using
Sketch, but their weird pricing model is _the_ reason I finally decided enough
was enough.

------
virgilp
It is a nice PR article, but if i was working at Bohemian, I wouldn't get
overly confident. Sketch indeed did a nice job, and they carved out a market
segment, but in doing so they caught Adobe's attention and it now responded by
launching XD. As with a corporation that size, the response was maybe slow,
but it is picking up steam and I speculate that in a few years XD will be an
extremely tough competitor for Sketch. XD is already fairly good (sometimes
better), it's already cross-platform, and Adobe has a relatively large and
rather competent team of developers working on it. So I have little doubt that
they'll soon have a better product on most, if not all aspects (1). The only
thing that could derail it at this point is loss of executive support, but
there's absolutely no sign of that, and I doubt it will happen.

[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.

~~~
usaphp
> XD is already fairly good (sometimes better)

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.

~~~
virgilp
> a little delusional about XD.

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.

------
tabs_masterrace
Big reason for this is probably pricing. Adobe's subscription model is hard on
startups, small companies & especially individuals, so people naturally look
at alternatives. And then they realize that Photoshop isn't quite the monopoly
it once was, and apps like Sketch, Affinity & Co. offer similar feature set,
while also being more specialized for the job.

~~~
toddmorey
Pricing is a part of it, sure, but the real reason I think is that Sketch was
designed from the group up to be a tool for creating digital UI. Without the
clutter and legacy of Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop, it was a breath of fresh
air. Also, I think it has an important advantage of feeling like a native Mac
app. I always feel like I’m firing up a virtual machine when I start Adobe
products.

~~~
mattkevan
My fairly recent MacBook boots up in less time than Photoshop takes to open.

Photoshop is amazing and I use it daily, but my goodness does it creak.

~~~
zozbot123
Photoshop is 'slow to open' because it takes more time than your laptop uses
to boot? That's nothing - have you never used GIMP?

~~~
avian
On my aging Lynnfield i5 and spinning-rust HDD, GIMP takes 2 seconds to open
(I just timed it - from pressing return in a terminal, to all windows
appearing on screen). That is faster than most websites load these days. And I
should add that I have quite a lot of custom Python plug-ins installed.

There's a lot of valid points that can be criticized about GIMP. Speed is not
one of them.

~~~
Amygaz
Same here. For small tasks I use GIMP because it’s a lot faster.

Loading my VM is faster than loading any Adobe products.

------
tobr
I was surprised this article doesn't mention DrawIt [1], Bohemian Coding's
first (?) drawing app designed for UI elements and icons, which would seem
rather familiar to any Sketch user today. It combined vector and pixel
graphics, and allowed you to compose any number of effects like blurs,
borders, shadows, bevels etc in a non-destructive stack.

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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090609142331/http://www.bohemiancoding.com:80/drawit/index.html)

2:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110225224308/http://www.bohemiancoding.com/)

------
seanalltogether
I've always been upset about the fact that Adobe abandoned Fireworks.
Fireworks always made sense to me when I had to cobble together graphics for
my websites or apps. Adobe behaves like a company not interested in expanding
their market, but just simply doubling down on it's existing cash cows until
the day they become irrelevant.

~~~
nexensis
Same here - Illustrator absorbed a lot of Fireworks features and offers decent
optimised JPG/PNG/SVG exports for web, but over the last few years it's become
excruciatingly slow while not really adding any new functionality.

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.

------
mlangenberg
The article should have also covered Figma, as I expect it to chew a large
chunk of Sketch's market share.

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.

~~~
oflannabhra
Not directly in Sketch, but our team uses Zeplin[0], which integrates with
Sketch, for that use case. Our designers still prefer Sketch, and Zeplin has
become an integral part of our workflow.

[0] - [https://zeplin.io](https://zeplin.io)

~~~
puranjay
I love the dimensions and color data you see when you hover over the main CTA
on their homepage. Brilliant design

------
jerrre
> Omvlee was very smart to target a large segment of the graphics sector’s
> largest, most powerful incumbent, as doing so created major tailwind for
> Sketch. Omvlee came to market with a differentiated product that was far
> better than even Adobe’s flagship product.

Great tip: just create something better than the household product for a large
segment. Why did I never think of that....

~~~
jerrre
On a more positive note:

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.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Is it an existing market? I got the impression a lot of their work and success
has been around prototyping mobile applications. This is a niche nobody served
and grew quite quickly.

~~~
nicky0
I think you could say it was a niche in an existing broader market, which had
previously been covered by Illustrator and Photoshop. Sketch came along with a
focused tool which did it better than the general-purpose tools. But it's not
like UI protoyping was impossible before Sketch came along.

------
jmull
> In the blog post announcing the move, Omvlee cited three reasons for his
> decision to abandon the Mac App Store in favor of direct sales: ... Apple’s
> insistence that desktop apps available through the Mac App Store be
> sandboxed for additional security, a stipulation that was impractical for
> Sketch.

I'm surprised by that. I'd have thought a user-document-based app like Sketch
would be ideal for sandboxing.

------
timrichard
Absolutely love Sketch. I got a license because I thought it would be useful
for UI design, but have been using it for all sorts of other things until I've
trained properly on it (such as room layout planning, etc). Looking forward to
using it for UX design when I know it a little better (I'm not a designer),
but I also think it could become my go-to SVG generator (from what I've
browsed on training courses from Lynda and Pluralsight).

------
dangthe
And then Adobe released XD. I give Sketch about 3 more years before it becomes
completely irrelevant.

~~~
mattkevan
Adobe have been working on XD for ages and it still doesn't hold a candle to
Sketch. It feels like it's born out of a scramble against Sketch, rather than
from a deep desire to create the best interface design tool.

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.

~~~
virgilp
Adobe _is_ serious about XD, though. There were some decisions which in
hindsight might've been suboptimal, let's say. So XD didn't move as fast as
many expected. But I feel it's picking up speed. Did you use it recently? As I
understand it, while it may not be better for everybody just yet, it
definitely holds a candle to Sketch now.

~~~
mattkevan
Yes, I'm always open to new tools and ways of doing things.

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.

------
pjmlp
Maybe for macOS users, because it is nowhere to be seen on Windows.

~~~
langitbiru
I don't know what they use to build Sketch. Probably Cocoa. If they use
Electron, Sketch can be used even in Linux. But then you would have some
people complain about the performance. You can not make everyone happy! :)

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....

~~~
neor
They don't use Electron. Their website states that they don't plan to release
Windows or Linux versions because of the large amount of native MacOS API's
they use making it very time consuming and costly to make a cross-platform
version of the app.

~~~
test1235
I guess there's a market for a windows/linux version of this app then? (tho'
maybe not as large, given pro-designer tendencies towards macs)

~~~
arthurfm
There's a third-party app for Windows called Lunacy [1] that can read/write
Sketch files, so there must be a market large enough to make that worthwhile.

[1] [https://icons8.com/lunacy](https://icons8.com/lunacy)

------
philfrasty
Wasn't there OmniGraffle on the Mac even before Sketch? Seemed to me in the
beginning that Sketch was an exact clone of OmniGraffle with a little nicer
interface. Sketch evolved a lot from that point on.

Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008

[1]
[https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html](https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html)

~~~
coldtea
OmniGraffle is for diagrams, general purpose vector drawing and UI design is
not its forte. At best you do some prototype wireframing there.

~~~
cimmanom
Yeah, OmniGraffle is awesome for diagramming, but awkward even for low-fi
wireframes.

------
zozbot123
> We also know that Omvlee decided to monetize his product almost immediately.
> This wasn’t part of a larger revenue strategy; as a student, Omvlee was
> living a humble lifestyle and needed the [f]unds ...

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.

------
therealmarv
And today we have Adobe XD which is free. Actually I used it recently to open
a .sketch file from a designer and it is the best free tool to open that
files... what irony. Also a sign that Adobe really fears Sketch and now they
are playing "here it is free" game :(

~~~
virgilp
Adobe XD is __not __free - it was free while in beta, now it is a launched
product that costs money.

[https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/compare-
plans.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/compare-plans.html)

~~~
therealmarv
I see a free starter plan there.

~~~
virgilp
Right, but that's very different from "Adobe XD is free". You wouldn't call
AWS "free", would you? (ok, this is an extreme difference, but for all we
know, it's only a matter of time until the non-free versions become
differentiated enough. It's not like Adobe doesn't know marketing)

~~~
mesh
The only difference between the free (Starter plan) and paid version is that
the free version limits you to sharing one prototype at at time.

Thats it. Otherwise, functionality is the same.

------
social_quotient
From a tech perspective what’s the reason the Windows version of this is so
allusive? Are there OS hooks that are so powerful on Mac that make a parallel
development for windows an insurmountable task?

Said from a windows ubuntu tech shop

~~~
futurix
Sketch heavily uses macOS specific APIs for drawing, hardware acceleration,
widgets, etc - I'd imagine Windows version would be a nearly complete rewrite
with much higher subsequent development costs.

~~~
vitaflo
Which is interesting because Adobe XD also heavily uses MacOS specific API's
and had to do a complete rewrite to support Windows. But Adobe has the
manpower to do that.

------
androidgirl
I'm absolutely happy people are taking on Illustrator/XD. I was a freelance
illustrator specializing in print while in college, and have grown dislike
Illustrator.

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.

~~~
jonny_eh
Try [https://www.figma.com/](https://www.figma.com/) ?

~~~
androidgirl
I checked Figma out before, afaik it doesn't let me locally save my files and
work on them without Internet on Linux.

Is that still the case now?

~~~
RobertKerans
Afaik that is still the case — they seem to have stuck with the web version. I
used Gravit for a while, but they got bought by Corel and the application has
gone from free to $100 for the "fully-featured" version (which given it's
basically a beta and is missing what I consider key features, is a bit much).
Akira [1] looks like it could possibly be the answer, but it's still a way off
(though usable)

[1] [https://github.com/Alecaddd/Akira](https://github.com/Alecaddd/Akira)

------
abalone
How does Figma compare to Sketch?

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.

------
sodosopa
Sketch allows anyone more access to really fuck up a design. Looks good, some
of the plugins/extensions are top notch but overall, it took the best of ideas
from inDesign and Illustrator and bastardized it and somehow people believe
it's better. It's different, it's new, but it's not better.

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.

------
jongold
I remember the buzz when Sketch 2 came out in 2012. Tons of us switched
immediately. Whilst I think Sketch has stagnated since then, what it initially
offered was a lightweight tool that was designed around the types of
primitives we used as designers.

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.

------
zellyn
The periodic references (mostly in a slightly negative tone) to not taking on
funding were confusing.

------
maxdo
They were the first but loosing created market to figma and other tools

------
ppeetteerr
Sketch fit into the niche left behind when Adobe killed Fireworks.

------
rbreve
There is still no photoshop substitute though

~~~
jongold
Affinity make great products

------
techaddict009
But have the really took over? I see designers who have shifted to Sketch
pretty happy compared to using Photoshop or Illustrator to design something.

------
rawTruthHurts
Let me un-editorialise the title a bit:

"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)"

~~~
pjmlp
And constrained to the few souls that use macOS for doing design.

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.

~~~
stupidbird
Most professional designers are still using Macs.

~~~
pjmlp
So the countries where Apple doesn't have a presence don't have professional
designers?

~~~
jinglebells
What countries are they?

~~~
pjmlp
Lots of countries where earning at least 500 euros per month is a dream come
true.

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.

------
InGodsName
I wonder why there aren't other cross platform sketch equivalent.

Question for cross platform experts:

If today, you were to create an app supporting Linux, Windows, Mac - which
toolkit/framework we must use?

~~~
Frizi
There exist a great one, which is called Figma. They use electron in
combination with WebAssembly to make it fast. I'd say that's a pretty decent
choice.

~~~
test1235
jumping straight into webassembly! very brave ... or is it actually more
mature (production-mature?) than I thought?

~~~
Frizi
Well, the support is pretty decent in evergreen browsers (and it already was
for a while), and in case of electron, you have precise control over your
runtime, so it's not really a problem. Also many engines have already done
quite substantial optimizations for handling wasm modules in combination with
JavaScript. It's all done with backward compatibility in mind, so what works
today will continue to do so.

