It’s Time to Dump Photoshop and Embrace Sketch

The quest to find a lightweight,focused alternative to Photoshop for UI/UX designers

Over the past few years or so I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with how inept Photoshop is for user interface, and user experience design. Adobe isn’t at fault, of course. It was never intended as an app for designing websites. Gaining popularity back when there was no feasible alternative. We’ve been using it ever since.

Photoshop’s a fantastic photo editing app, as the name implies. But the tools that make it a great photo editing app, are also what makes it a poor web design app. Too many tools, too much… stuff. Of course I’m not the first person to say this. Designers have been complaining for years that Photoshop is bloated.

Personally, I could get all my design work done in Photoshop if I only had the move, marquee, fill, type, and measuring tools. When you get down to it, our job as designers for the most part is about moving type and shapes around the canvas until they look and feel right. We as UI designers don’t need 3D tools, fancy filters, or content-aware fill.

Designing UI in Photoshop is like using a chainsaw to cut paper when all you need is a pair of scissors

Fireworks, Illustrator, InDesign, have all been recommended as good alternatives for UI design, but they’ve never quite been able to win the hearts and minds of designers. Fireworks had the best shot, but its interface felt clunky—especially in something so fundamental as color selection.

Is there a viable alternative? Yes, there is! Enter Sketch.

Sketch hits the sweet spot. It’s lightweight, 100% vector, and focused entirely at designers. Oh, and it’s blazingly fast, too.

Bohemian Coding, the team behind the app has this to say about it.

“Sketch is a professional vector graphics app with a beautiful interface and powerful tools. We set out to build a better app for graphic designers. Not to copy, but rather to improve”

Sketch’s lightweight minimal interface

I first stumbled upon Sketch about 6 months ago. Admittedly I was skeptical at first. But I gave it a shot, and boy do I not regret it.

Adapting to it wasn’t without its teething issues, however. Within a few weeks of using it I had gotten so frustrated with game-breaking issues and bugs that I quit using it all together. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long until their 2.3 patch came out in August and fixed almost all the issues I had with it, and added a bunch of features I’d asked for, including a massive speed increase. I was in love.

Bohemian Coding is constantly updating the app, often with features requested by the community. Like the recently released Sketch Mirror. They wanted an app to mirror their Sketch canvas from their desktop, to their iPhone. They got it.

With Sketch being 100% vector based this means that it’s super easy to tweak your design on the fly, as shown in the examples below.