Co-founders of Sketch shared their stance on AI: ​“We’re not ready to make a move with AI just yet — for reasons that will become clear. However, we wanted to share the principles that will guide our approach when that time comes.”

I respect their position on using AI to aid designers but never to create designs. To me, Make Design was the least exciting AI feature announced at Config, and I’m glad it was reframed as the First Draft during the relaunch a few weeks ago. Their focus on privacy and being local-first is a smart way to differentiate from Figma and offer something unique, even if that required burying Sketch Cloud first.

A blog post from Sketch co-founders outlining their strategy for 2023 and beyond. After layoffs in October, they’ve refocused as a company and doubled down on their two-apps approach: ​“You shouldn’t have to learn how to use design tools to give feedback on designs, test a prototype, or inspect files for handoff. Meanwhile, designers should get an editing experience that speaks to their needs and workflows, without any distractions.”

They’ve also redesigned their website (looks fantastic!) and are launching the community forum on February 23rd. The primary focus is on polishing the apps and talking to users. One of the new Sketch features is support for opening .fig files — the tables have turned indeed.

Vijay Verma is a prolific member of the Figma community (see his projects featured in the past), and in this Twitter thread, he explains why he picked Figma over Sketch or Penpot. Don’t miss his time-lapse comparison of all three tools on YouTube, where he created the same icon and analyzed some key points.

I love his conclusion: ​“At the end, I learned that a tool is just a tool. It doesn’t matter what tool you choose depending on your needs, just start creating. You will find a way to achieve what you want to create with what you have on hand.”

Sorry to hear the bad news and wish the best to the Sketch team: ​“In response to challenging market conditions and with a desire to keep our product-first strategy, we’ve taken the difficult decision to reduce our team by just over 80 people. This will mostly impact Operations and Marketing, who have done great work in the recent weeks and months. Our Product team remains well-equipped, with a core team continuing to drive things forward.”

Graeme Fulton looks into the difference between ​“open design” and ​“open-source design tools”, the new opportunity for an era of open-source design amidst Adobe ⨉ Figma, and how designers can be a driving force behind open-source itself. Sketch’s open file format is something we’ve always taken for granted.

I’m not a big fan of Sketch’s ​“Sketch vs Figma” page, but I had a big laugh over this. Highly resourceful.

This is an unusual link for this place, but Rafa makes great observations about superior parts of Sketch. I’ve been skeptical about their Workspace and Real-time Collaboration, but the UI and native features were always top-notch. Glad they’re still competing with a strong product!

Karen Liu shares the pains of using Sketch + Abstract combo and why her team at Brave embraced Figma, even while it meant completely rebuilding the design system.

Mizko shares his opinion along with votes from 913 designers on the best design tools in 2021.

Great skit by Pablo Stanley that made rounds in the community. Love how both Figma and Sketch played along and changed their names on Twitter for a while!

Sketch team wrote a beautiful essay on why they are committed to building a native Mac app. I love high-quality Mac apps, and Sketch is definitely one of them, but most of the time, design apps are not used in solitude. When it comes to collaboration, web-based multiplayer apps are just more open and efficient. See also comments on Hacker News.

A new plugin from Figmatic for converting and exporting designs from Figma to Sketch with a single click.

No idea who needs this, but worth bookmarking just in case.

While the title mentions only Adobe XD, I liked how they also tried Sketch for Teams and Framer X before settling on Figma. Their final scoresheet is very detailed and seems quite accurate.

The article compares three main players — Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD. Figma is the recommended tool, but Adobe XD has its own market with more complex prototypes.

Alex from Doist shared his feelings about trying Figma, and Rafa from Netlify pointed to some specific problems in its interface. My favorite part — Koen Bok from Framer showed up in replies to remind how much Sketch team raised the bar for the design tools.