I have to say I was initially hesitant when we first discussed using Sketch. In the past I've used a range of applications to design with - Photoshop, InDesign, Keynote, etc - but for me, my go-to application has been Adobe Illustrator. It's a brilliant tool. During our discussions, and the research I had done previously, I couldn't help but make comparisons between Sketch and Illustrator as nearly all of the key features people are excited about have been available in Illustrator for quite some time. Tonnes of blog posts have been written comparing Sketch to photoshop, it baffled me as to why nobody’s made comparisons between Sketch and Illustrator. Speaking with the team, I couldn't quite grasp the appeal of Sketch from its feature set alone.

I could however see its appeal from other angles. Sketch has a simple UI with close familiarities to Keynote, an application we love at Made by Many. Applications like Illustrator and Photoshop appear over complicated in comparison. One of the benefits of using Keynote is that pretty much anyone in the team is able to edit artwork without much trouble. Sketch appeared to provided the same opportunity, but with a more advanced feature set that focused on design. We also hoped there might be specific benefits for our frontend developers, with it's powerful exporting functionality - both for imagery and CSS. And finally, it appeared to be a reasonably priced, interesting product, which unlike many others focused on UI design. We decided to give it a go.

Compared to other applications Sketch was easy to become familiar with. Once I had configured my keyboard shortcuts and worked with it for a few days I was content. That said, over the past few months my relationship with Sketch has been a love/hate one.

I've loved its simple user interface, some of the subtile details are incredibly well considered. Built in grids have proved very useful, and although an OSX feature, autosave has saved my life a number of times.

I’ve disliked Sketch when there have been performance issues. I initially began using the stable version which can be downloaded from the App Store, but as soon as I began working with larger files the application became very slow. It would delay zooming, moving the canvas and drawing objects. I decided to try the Beta to see if any of the performance issues had been resolved... They had! But with a Beta comes other problems: instability, crashes, corrupt files etc.

A couple of months ago I was speaking with Paul H about Keynote and he said something that stuck with me:

For so much of the time the problems I've experienced with jolty movements when navigating a file, restarting from a crash and recovering corrupt design files have been constant interruptions, disrupting workflow, breaking my train of thought and distracting me from the task at hand, designing.

Looking back over the past few months of using Sketch, it's surprising to see how few of the key features I've used on a regular basis. Some of the main features I had imagined would have been useful have been used once or twice, or not at all. It's easy to get suckered in by a fancy feature set, but if you're unable to make good use of them due to poor performance, what's the point? Don't get me wrong, I've experienced performance issues and crashes across many design applications, not just Sketch, but what I've come to realise is that I would always trade a fancy feature set for high performance and stability. This is after all what allows the tool to get out of our way and let us design.

I must end this by saying that it's incredibly impressive what Bohemian Coding have able to achieve with such a small team, and how quickly they respond to fixing the bugs they find. It's truly inspiring to see that they are able to compete with software giants like Adobe. I'm still using the Beta (Version 2.3 (3622)) and currently enjoying it. Improvements are constantly being made to the UI, but most importantly, it's seems quick and it's stable. My one hope is that they continue to focus is on bug fixing and improving the applications performance before to adding to the feature set.