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> Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing what could be accomplished ... I use both frequently

> Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing what could be accomplished ... I use both frequently and Sketch is far better than Figma. But Figma had one thing really going for it: it works on every platform with a browser, while Sketch is (sadly) Mac only. Every designer and his dog might have a Mac in the US, but the rest of the world is a different story. Lately, Sketch does show that it is moving in the direction of a cloud, but I doubt that we'd see a web editor from them anytime soon.

solardev 4y ago
What do you like better about Sketch? (Just curious. I'm a FE dev and all the designers I've worked with have moved to Figma over the last few years, and you're the only one who's ever told me it was better.)
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Somewhat ironically, as a frontend dev, I've never met a UI designer that really convinced me they were in-tune with designing for the context. If Figma did a better job of enabling them to design as well as they possibly could for the web or android or whatever they were working on specifically, then that's what I'd get behind. For ne personally, there was always a limitation in how the tools let me design for the responsive web, as well as letting me apply graphic design principles in a way that actually worked for that context. The best I ever got from a designer, even if I could admit that they were much better than me in terms of design skills, it was always hard to tell what was the reason they wouldn't be able to provide a mobile-first design that made sense. It was always some ridiculous large screen layout that they expected me to rethink in order to map it to various sizes.
  - solardev 4y ago
    What do you mean by "for the context"? Are you saying that the designers you worked with only ever provided you with desktop designs, no mobile or tablet views? That'd be pretty strange in this day and age. I usually get at least a mobile and desktop view, sometimes also a tablet view in between. And it's easier to make components responsive these days with auto layout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJTx55HFubfbTL3ellJjBM2QE2&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJT... If you're not getting mobile designs along with larger screen views, well... I dunno what to say. It really should be automatic these days, but you can always explicitly require it from your designers...
    - brailsafe 4y ago
      It wasn't necessarily "these days" but pretty recently. No I wouldn't say it was always just a desktop view, but it was usually a sort of clumsily patched together series of independent mobile and desktop views like you describe. Little relationship between the range of sizes fron smallest to largest, and clearly it was started on the largest. There were a few other web based products that have come and gone that attempted to make waves, but when I tried them, they just made the process of designing mobile-first pretty awful and tedious compared to just doing it in code. Maybe Figma got the model just right, but on the other hand I never really heard much complaint from designers I'd work with, because I'd always ask how they liked the tools, but they never really cared about the theory enough, because they weren't implementing or testing.
      - solardev 4y ago
        I see. That makes sense... yeah, the design tools still do struggle with a proper responsive workflow. Some of the less experienced designers also don't necessarily understand the box model or CSS limitations and come up designs more suitable for print that are really hard to translate to a DOM (and result in a poor UX even if you do). The joy of Figma is that it makes collaborative wireframing and prototyping much nicer, but it still can't produce full-fidelity DOM mockups :( I don't see Figma as replacing something like Dreamweaver (which actually operated on the DOM), but more like a better prototyping tool than Photoshop or Sketch -- primarily because it makes it trivial to view designs and iterations on the web. That means the designer still has a lot of freedom to make designs that unfortunately don't neatly conform to the DOM... but that's good, because hey, that's job security for us, right? :) The day we get a true interactive WYSIWYG, FE devs will be outta a job, lol.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  For starters, it is far more faster, and it is not in the browser. I use design tools mostly to throw in some interface mockups, and I work alone, so I don't benefit from Figma's killer features of concurrent multi-user editing and its availability on multiple platforms. One other big feature Figma has is it's approach to multi-point vector shapes, it is useful when designing some icons, but not enough to outweigh a general drop in performance. I also like that in Sketch I can control the app and not be dependent on some remote server to do the work, especially if server owners are prone to cancelling service without valid reasons - Recently Figma has announced that it will be unavailable to Russian people, regardless of their political views, which is rather ironic, as the vast majority of Figma users are very much against Putin's regime. To be fair, Sketch owners too had pathetically followed Figma and announced that they stop selling licenses to Russian users, but at least the old licenses still work, and if they would stop for some reason, the last resort would still be available: cracked versions on torrent sites. You don't get such guarantees with SaaS apps, you are always dependent on their whims. Also, this is the least relevant to your question, but having followed the two products for a while I'm pretty much convinced that it is mostly Sketch that does interface innovations that are quickly copied by Figma, and not the reverse. So I prefer to support the people who do the innovations.
brailsafe 4y ago
I haven't done UI design in a while, but Sketch was what I used for the most part. Worked with a few teams that used invision. I never really thought of realtime collaboration between designers as all that crucial, but I'm willing to believe I've missed something there.
- solardev 4y ago
  Invision doesn't really have the editing tools that Figma and Sketch do, right? Like you can't easily wireframe or make components there or import readymade component libraries from the web, right? (like these: https://mui.com/store/#design https://mui.com/store/#design) The live multiplayer is cool, but admittedly just having an easily shareable link (google docs) style that any manager/dev/client can view and comment on was nice. No desktop app needed, no transferring files back and forth, just an evergreen link to the design. How does Sketch handle that sort of iteration?
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    Invision was awful, but I believe sone of those tools were there. Sketch I'm not sure, again I was just using it for hobby stuff. It's a decent enough svg groahics editor, but did seem a little clunky. I think the features you mention are pretty important.

solardev 4y ago

What do you like better about Sketch? (Just curious. I'm a FE dev and all the designers I've worked with have moved to Figma over the last few years, and you're the only one who's ever told me it was better.)

brailsafe 4y ago
Somewhat ironically, as a frontend dev, I've never met a UI designer that really convinced me they were in-tune with designing for the context. If Figma did a better job of enabling them to design as well as they possibly could for the web or android or whatever they were working on specifically, then that's what I'd get behind. For ne personally, there was always a limitation in how the tools let me design for the responsive web, as well as letting me apply graphic design principles in a way that actually worked for that context. The best I ever got from a designer, even if I could admit that they were much better than me in terms of design skills, it was always hard to tell what was the reason they wouldn't be able to provide a mobile-first design that made sense. It was always some ridiculous large screen layout that they expected me to rethink in order to map it to various sizes.
- solardev 4y ago
  What do you mean by "for the context"? Are you saying that the designers you worked with only ever provided you with desktop designs, no mobile or tablet views? That'd be pretty strange in this day and age. I usually get at least a mobile and desktop view, sometimes also a tablet view in between. And it's easier to make components responsive these days with auto layout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJTx55HFubfbTL3ellJjBM2QE2&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh98SF7OjUk&list=PLXDU_eVOJT... If you're not getting mobile designs along with larger screen views, well... I dunno what to say. It really should be automatic these days, but you can always explicitly require it from your designers...
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    It wasn't necessarily "these days" but pretty recently. No I wouldn't say it was always just a desktop view, but it was usually a sort of clumsily patched together series of independent mobile and desktop views like you describe. Little relationship between the range of sizes fron smallest to largest, and clearly it was started on the largest. There were a few other web based products that have come and gone that attempted to make waves, but when I tried them, they just made the process of designing mobile-first pretty awful and tedious compared to just doing it in code. Maybe Figma got the model just right, but on the other hand I never really heard much complaint from designers I'd work with, because I'd always ask how they liked the tools, but they never really cared about the theory enough, because they weren't implementing or testing.
    - solardev 4y ago
      I see. That makes sense... yeah, the design tools still do struggle with a proper responsive workflow. Some of the less experienced designers also don't necessarily understand the box model or CSS limitations and come up designs more suitable for print that are really hard to translate to a DOM (and result in a poor UX even if you do). The joy of Figma is that it makes collaborative wireframing and prototyping much nicer, but it still can't produce full-fidelity DOM mockups :( I don't see Figma as replacing something like Dreamweaver (which actually operated on the DOM), but more like a better prototyping tool than Photoshop or Sketch -- primarily because it makes it trivial to view designs and iterations on the web. That means the designer still has a lot of freedom to make designs that unfortunately don't neatly conform to the DOM... but that's good, because hey, that's job security for us, right? :) The day we get a true interactive WYSIWYG, FE devs will be outta a job, lol.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
For starters, it is far more faster, and it is not in the browser. I use design tools mostly to throw in some interface mockups, and I work alone, so I don't benefit from Figma's killer features of concurrent multi-user editing and its availability on multiple platforms. One other big feature Figma has is it's approach to multi-point vector shapes, it is useful when designing some icons, but not enough to outweigh a general drop in performance. I also like that in Sketch I can control the app and not be dependent on some remote server to do the work, especially if server owners are prone to cancelling service without valid reasons - Recently Figma has announced that it will be unavailable to Russian people, regardless of their political views, which is rather ironic, as the vast majority of Figma users are very much against Putin's regime. To be fair, Sketch owners too had pathetically followed Figma and announced that they stop selling licenses to Russian users, but at least the old licenses still work, and if they would stop for some reason, the last resort would still be available: cracked versions on torrent sites. You don't get such guarantees with SaaS apps, you are always dependent on their whims. Also, this is the least relevant to your question, but having followed the two products for a while I'm pretty much convinced that it is mostly Sketch that does interface innovations that are quickly copied by Figma, and not the reverse. So I prefer to support the people who do the innovations.

brailsafe 4y ago

I haven't done UI design in a while, but Sketch was what I used for the most part. Worked with a few teams that used invision. I never really thought of realtime collaboration between designers as all that crucial, but I'm willing to believe I've missed something there.

solardev 4y ago
Invision doesn't really have the editing tools that Figma and Sketch do, right? Like you can't easily wireframe or make components there or import readymade component libraries from the web, right? (like these: https://mui.com/store/#design https://mui.com/store/#design) The live multiplayer is cool, but admittedly just having an easily shareable link (google docs) style that any manager/dev/client can view and comment on was nice. No desktop app needed, no transferring files back and forth, just an evergreen link to the design. How does Sketch handle that sort of iteration?
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Invision was awful, but I believe sone of those tools were there. Sketch I'm not sure, again I was just using it for hobby stuff. It's a decent enough svg groahics editor, but did seem a little clunky. I think the features you mention are pretty important.