Along with most of the design community I made the switch to Sketch. last year. The transition was great. It’s so fast! So fast that I started using it to replace sketching. This turned out to be a mistake.

An important part of the design process is being aware what medium you choose to communicate in.

For most points in this article, “Sketch” can really apply to any high fidelity drawing app (Photoshop etc).

1. Sketch really pushes you to high fidelity.

Sketch’s strength (It’s so wonderful for pixel-perfect mocks) is its weakness here. It pushes you to “move this a few pixels” instead of trying a variety of ideas. This then encourages you to think less about interactions and more about static pages and visual styling.

There’s also a flow on effect to the types of feedback you get. When you share high fidelity work you get more critiques about small elements, and less feedback on big ideas.

2. Sketch gets you into flow but it ends up being slow

Sketch often starts off feeling fast. I can drag a few elements in and I’m 80% done! But then I look at that 20% and I start fiddling. Suddenly I look up and realize I’ve been fiddling with a few pixels for over an hour. It feels so fast. But it’s slower for trying low fidelity ideas than sketching on paper.

3. Sketch.app makes it hard to show what is important

When I’m doing low fidelity sketches I only fill in the important details. Anything extra gets ignored.This helps focus the conversation on those details. In sketch, if you drag in pre-made elements it’s harder to tell what is important.

4. Sketch Shuts down the conversation.

High fidelity mock-ups are very clear in how they will look at the end. Low fidelity sketches always have a level of ambiguity in them. This means that you often end up walking people through the design rather than painstakingly documenting it. These conversations can help you think through more of the details, and save the documentation until it’s needed.