Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Sketch founders Pieter & Emanuel

About AI in Sketch, we’re toying with a few ideas, but it’s too early to share anything. There’s a few tools announced but nothing we’ve tried yet ourselves that has floored us.

Well, first we believe that design market is big enough to support multiple tools, and we like to focus on making our customers’ workflows better, more so than pitching ourselves against a competitor. One also has to be realistic: Figma raised an obscene amount of money and we haven’t, so we’re better off focussing on what we do well.
We’re still very proud of our editor, and improving it with every release. From smaller QoL improvements such as we shared a couple of updates back to big new features such as Annotations, we’re not standing still.
We know people are impatiently waiting for for Smart Layout feature to be available in regular groups, and we’re hard at work on that. I think you’ll it when you see it. It’s actually available in the Sketch 96 beta behind an experimental Labs feature flag. It needs more work, but we were eager to share the early version with our community and we hope you like it as much as we do. :slight_smile:

There’s large and small things we do here to make that area better. In the last Sketch update we shipped Document Libraries, which cuts down on the amount of libraries you have to always keep enabled, which in turn makes it easier to find the component you actually need. We’re also in the process of rewriting some lower-level bits there to improve speed. Around Sketch 92 we exposed all the layers inside Symbols and allowed more overrides, including the ability to change text alignment, and we’re continuously exposing more. In the next update you’ll be able to easily hide layers inside a symbol - which triggers smart layout, and add Descriptions to symbols, which then show up from the web app to the insert menu, making it easier for the entire team to share notes on which components are best used where.

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