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Easy to use interface: Reviewers have consistently found Sketch's interface to be easy to understand and navigate, with similarities to …
Overview
What is Sketch?
Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.
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What is Sketch?
Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is Figma?
Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
What is Adobe XD?
Adobe XD is a prototyping and UX/UI option for website and mobile application design, featuring a range of UI tools and and templates, a versatile artboard and contextual layer panels, and deep integration with Adobe's creative suite of products for fast import of objects from these applications.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Sketch?
According to the vendor, Sketch is a software application exclusively available for Mac computers. Its primary objective is to serve as a platform that empowers designers in their creative endeavors by offering a wide range of features including design creation, collaboration, and prototyping capabilities. Additionally, it provides a web-based interface where individuals can conveniently review designs, provide feedback, inspect specific elements, and facilitate project handoffs through any internet browser. Although the precise industries or professions targeted by Sketch are not explicitly identified by the vendor, it claims to be an all-encompassing design tool suitable for professionals working in diverse fields with a focus on design-oriented tasks or responsibilities.
Wide Range of Tools and Features
The product is designed to offer an intuitive and user-friendly interface that facilitates the design process, catering to both inexperienced and advanced users. Sketch provides features and a platform that enables designers to effortlessly create visually impressive designs. The vendor boasts functionalities such as Libraries, compatibility with industry tools, and a plugin community, which allow for efficient creation and scalability of design systems across multiple brands and platforms. Moreover, Sketch incorporates functionality for prototyping, collaboration, and developer handoff. Its robust vector editing tool empowers users with full control over their designs throughout the entire design process. Ultimately, Sketch aims to be a comprehensive design platform addressing the needs of designers seeking efficiency, scalability, and creative flexibility in their work.
Canvas Comments
The product aims to facilitate real-time collaboration among users, enabling simultaneous work across Mac and web applications. Users can share comments and engage in conversations directly on the canvas, promoting efficient communication and feedback exchange. This collaborative feature is inclusive within the subscription at no additional cost, allowing users with subscriptions to invite others for collaborative sessions. In summary, Sketch offers robust design tools that encourage teamwork and enhance the efficiency of the design process.
Color Variables
The product is designed to enhance efficiency in the design process by allowing designers to create color tokens from color variables and synchronize them with development projects. Users can define color variables, text styles, and layer styles, which can be easily applied, reused, and updated across designs. The product offers a range of functions that enable efficient exporting, integration, and synchronization of color variables with development projects. Incorporating color variables into libraries helps ensure consistency in colors across multiple documents and facilitates collaboration among team members. Additionally, users can inspect color variables and maintain design consistency through symbols, styles, and color variables. Various functionalities are available such as finding and replacing colors or color variables and selecting preferred color models (RGB, HSB or HSL) throughout the design workflow. Convenient integration into projects is enabled through support for downloading or generating URLs for CSS or JSON formats of color tokens. These features collectively contribute to maintaining design element consistency while offering customization flexibility.
View & Mirror
The application seeks to deliver a smooth user experience for designers, enabling them to easily access and navigate their Sketch documents on mobile devices. The provider asserts that it allows designers to preview prototypes in real-time, which proves valuable for presentations or the exchange of ideas with stakeholders. Additional functionalities include offline mode, Handoff compatibility, and the ability to mirror content from Mac to iPhone or iPad devices. The product places emphasis on its capacity to swiftly transform mockups into immersive prototypes, affording designers an opportunity to evaluate designs directly through a browser or an iPhone device. Furthermore, the View & Mirror app furnishes users with a comprehensive Canvas view on iPads, facilitating exploration and browsing of their workspace from any location. Overall, this feature-rich application endeavors to heighten designers' efficiency by offering document viewing flexibility and prototype testing while ensuring synchronization across multiple devices.
Artboard Templates
The product offers the ability to convert a desired Artboard into a reusable template, whether it be a specific layout or combination of layers. The vendor recommends integrating these templates into a Library for easy accessibility in other projects, eliminating the need to start from scratch and saving designers time and effort. With flexible Artboards and Templates, organizing designs becomes smoother, enabling an efficient workflow for users. Users can select preset Artboard sizes or create custom ones as per their needs. The Components view allows convenient display and reorganization of Symbols and Artboard templates while providing options to modify Text Styles, Layer Styles, and Color Variables. This feature focuses on promoting efficiency by avoiding redundant work and offering tools such as resizing options for different screen sizes and customizable grid settings for precise design. Sketch provides an extensive range of features specifically designed to enhance productivity throughout the design process.
Sketch Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.1.
The most common users of Sketch are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Easy to use interface: Reviewers have consistently found Sketch's interface to be easy to understand and navigate, with similarities to other prototyping applications. This positive sentiment is shared by many users who appreciate the user-friendly design, making it accessible for both novice and experienced designers.
Versatile symbol libraries: Many reviewers have praised Sketch's ability to create custom symbol libraries or download available ones for free or purchase. This feature allows users to easily create and customize their designs, resulting in a versatile and fast tool that can be tailored according to their specific needs.
Time-saving features: A significant number of users have mentioned that Sketch eliminates the need for manual creation of form fields and UI elements before using them in wireframe layouts. This time-saving feature has been highly appreciated by reviewers, as it allows them to focus more on the creative aspects of their designs rather than repetitive tasks.
Buggy software after release: Many users have reported experiencing bugs in the software shortly after a new release, indicating a lack of thorough QA testing. Some users have encountered frequent crashes, especially when reloading plugins.
Limited features and functionalities: Users have mentioned that the software lacks certain features, necessitating the use of plugins for additional functionalities such as design system management, accessibility, repository, and live collaboration.
Clumsy user interface: The user interface can feel awkward to navigate, particularly when working with documents that have numerous pages. Users have expressed frustration over the absence of an option to organize pages into a folder hierarchy, resulting in having to scroll through a lengthy list to locate specific pages. Manipulating nested symbols can be confusing and challenging due to the interface displaying a plain list of items without clear visual separation between objects.
Users commonly recommend using Sketch for a wide range of digital design tasks, including wireframing, static prototyping, visual design for web and mobile products, vector graphics, design experimentation, and creating efficient page layouts. They suggest that Sketch is a powerful tool for UX and web design and that it saves time in designing mockups for mobile and web.
To improve efficiency in design work, users recommend taking advantage of Sketch's features such as symbols and plugins. They suggest mastering symbols and character styles in Sketch and installing plugins to enhance productivity. Users also advise reading up on tips and tricks to get started with Sketch.
In order to further improve the design workflow in Sketch, users recommend considering complementary tools like Craft manager and Zeplin. They suggest thinking about how these tools can integrate with Sketch to streamline the design process. Additionally, users recommend exploring the realistic design capabilities of Sketch.
Overall, users find Sketch to be a valuable tool in the design industry due to its ease of use, versatility, and affordability. They suggest comparing it to other illustration tools to see if it meets specific needs and recommend trying the 30-day free trial before making a purchase.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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November 28, 2023
Sketch is an amazing prototyping tool!
I put together wireframes that I then hand off to my UX counterparts. They then take those and turn them into high fidelity designs that we use to test with customers. Sketch works great for this.
- It's easy to use
- It is fast
- It works with a lot of other tools we use
- Sometimes it is frustrating that the keyboard shortcuts are not the same as photoshop
- image editing capabilities
- more templates
June 10, 2021
One of the best UI design software
We design mocks using Sketch and also use it as internal design system within the team. We also used its prototyping features in many cases. Main task is to create mocks to be shared with the development team. We used adobe products before sketch and it has helped us save a lot of time in design.
- Design system.
- UI Design.
- Vector Design.
- Design component repository.
- It could use a web version like Figma.
- It can get slow at times.
- File sharing could be improved.
I use Sketch to create assets for my web development projects. It is my preferred tool even though I have Adobe Illustrator available. The web-focused design of Sketch has everything I need to get the job done without the complexity. I especially like the export options which allow me to generate multiple exports all at once.
- Excellent user interface without the bloat of Illustrator.
- Multiple exports generated in one click.
- Excellent toolset for web design.
- Switched to the dreaded subscription model!
- No glaring omissions to the product.
April 03, 2021
Sketch, all round and solid
Sketch is my preferred tool to start envisioning the first visual ideas of a digital product, whatever it is. It's perfect for having an idea and visualizing it within a couple of minutes. It's such a versatile tool because it's really great for early explorations of an idea as well as making very accurate prototypes or complete design systems ready for production.
- Having instant preview of a screen design on a mobile device.
- Easily created design systems with nested objects.
- Exporting multiple formats and sizes in one click.
- Editing and creating vector artwork.
- More control over vector editing, handles, curves and points.
- It would be great to see more animation functionalities.
- Being able to create 3D models would be perfect.
January 18, 2020
Sketch is a great vector design tool
I use Sketch personally at work. I believe that I'm the only person in my department who uses it, and I might be pretty much the only one in my organization who uses it. I use Sketch as my primary design tool for web sites and vector graphics for use on the web.
- Vector graphics.
- Website design.
- Bitmap editing.
- Better support for SVGs from other apps.
December 14, 2019
A very good design tool for your business!
Sketch allows our company to make highly professional landing pages, illustrations, slides, pitch decks, diagrams, etc. With some plugins or extensions, our designers can export presets and code, which is wonderful to create websites after, using that code.
- Amazing app for UI/UX design. This is prototyping as its best.
- Being able to use a lot of plugins for more advanced features and designs gives you a lot of useful features when utilizing Sketch.
- The only aspect we dislike about Sketch is the high price, but when compared to other similar applications, it is one of the more inexpensive options available.
Our product, design, and development teams use Sketch to host our design style guide and symbol library. The product and design teams use Sketch to create mockups, wireframes, etc., and then use Sketch's Marvel integration to hand designs off to the devs. The product content strategy team also uses Sketch to create internal images and visuals (e.g., annotated product screenshots, tone maps, infographics, diagrams).
- It's extremely easy to create symbols in Sketch. This makes it very, very fast to re-use components across designs. Not only does this save time, but it keeps our work consistent across users and designs.
- Sketch always loads incredibly quickly, no matter how large the file size or how many images/artboards the file contains. It's like magic, especially compared to some of the clunkier software I've used.
- Sketch offers a fantastic spread of third-party plugins. The Marvel plugin makes it incredibly easy to upload/sync designs before dev handoffs.
- As with similar software, Sketch does have a learning curve. Sketch is incredibly easy to use once you're comfortable with the navigation, know the keyboard shortcuts, etc. Before you're at that point, however, it can be difficult. I already had experience with programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InVision, and took to Sketch very quickly. But one of my colleagues who has less experience with these types of tools is unable to use Sketch efficiently, even after several months.
- Sketch is only available for OS. This wasn't a huge problem for our company, where the design and product teams all use MacBooks, but it means it's harder to share with other teams (like the devs, who use PCs).
- The basic image editing Sketch offers is pretty limited. Although that's not the main reason anyone at our company uses Sketch, it would be nice to be able to erase parts of an image or do some basic masking.
March 27, 2019
Sketch was great. Until Figma came along.
Sketch solves prototyping interactive products. This is either to get buy-in from stakeholders, or to show the intent of what a product will be for developers. Sketch helps us quickly visualize a design and rapidly iterate. It's being utilized by our UX and UI designers primarily, but the deliverables of Sketch are utilized by a wider range of the organization for communication purposes.
- High fidelity interactive mockups.
- Very user-friendly interface for a design program.
- Incredibly competitive price point, especially when compared to Adobe.
- Sketch hasn't innovated in a while. They used to be a leader here, but have slowed down and are now playing catch-up to other design programs.
- Being made for Mac only is extremely limiting.
- Working on their design system is a pretty poor experience compared to alternatives.
December 19, 2018
Pixel perfect made easy with Sketch
As a member of our product definition and user experience team, we have many tools to design the user interface of our product and Sketch is typically used for nearly all of our design and layout. The product is primarily used by our team to mock up pixel-perfect ideas, click-throughs and communicating workflow to our development team. Sketch is also coupled with a few other tools/plugins that allow us to make click-through user tests and some content control, allowing us to share ideas in a native way with our developers. Although this is used exclusively in our UX team, we try to include many of our teams in the process of UX and design so we have developers and quality engineers that are also using templates and asset sheets so they can simply layout and share ideas quickly.
- Sketch has a nice plugin and partner set of applications so you can extend the use through partnerships they have built. These plugins can also speed up layouts as well as templates that can be reused quickly.
- Sketch has a great layout, support of an eye friendly dark mode and has great organization of assets. You can quickly create pages, groups and control all aspects of the visual effects of each and every level.
- Drawing tools are wonderful and they have all the expected graphics based drawing and boolean options necessary for building layouts, icons and effects.
- Although they have gotten much better, the stability of large sketch files was a bit flaky.
- I would like to see some online services provided natively to Sketch for things like version control (instead of using Abstract)
December 15, 2018
Sketch is great!
My organization builds websites for companies and Sketch is an integral part in our UX design process. I'm not a UX designer myself, but I know our designer and developers use this program heavily to rely on building out the website. Instead, I use Sketch for our social media graphics and campaigns for clients. Our designers are able to design templates for me (not a designer) to use, and it makes it easy for me to quickly edit and update graphics on the fly.
- Sketch is great for saving multiple artboards in one file and keeping like-minded documents together.
- The layers are super easy to distinguish and label and it makes editing various parts of a design really easy.
- Sketch can be a bit buggy when it comes to saving documents or working in the latest version. If you don't have the most up-to-date version, the app can crash frequently.
- It's not great for transferring design assets quickly like it is with Adobe products.
- Drilling down into specific layers can be a bit convoluted.
December 11, 2018
Reliable and trustworthy
We use Sketch for basically all of our web and product design needs. The main users are the design team, with some stakeholders also opening Sketch when need be. It solves our UI design needs as the leader in the industry.
- Libraries — able to manage design system components comprehensively
- Prototyping — having native prototyping built right in is so much more convenient than looping in another tool
- Shareable — sharing Sketch designs with coworkers is easy, either via Abstract or Zeplin or with the easy-to-use built-in export options
- Color library management is still a bit wonky
- Not super speedy
- Can crash sometimes
December 03, 2018
Best application for UX Professionals
As a designer in a company of Windows users, Sketch unfortunately isn't used as wide-spread as it could be because it's a Mac-only application. However for me it handles a number of uses in doing user interface design and user experience. To name a few uses:
- Symbol Library allows for reuse of UI elements
- Prototyping brings ideas to life
- Clean interface brings efficiency to the design process
- Prototyping. Create interactive designs, publish and share for feedback
- Design Library. Create a library of commonly used design elements from type to icons
- Continually Updated. There's always something new happening with Sketch, it's updated frequently with new and better tools
- Tools. Sketch allows for third-party app development so that the community can make tools that work with Sketch
- Photo-editing is minimal
- Work flow symbols would be nice for building flow charts
- Prebuilt templates would be cool