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

[pieteromvlee]

@clayteller

• I’m a web designer and developer, and ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot are game-changers for my development process. Do you know of any promising AI design tools that either exist already or are being developed? Any you’d like to see? Thoughts about how AI may be used within Sketch?

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.

@clayteller

• I love Sketch and have heavily invested in it as my primary web design tool. I worry when I hear any news about Figma gaining popularity. Going forward, what will it take for Sketch to reign supreme over Figma, or at least stand apart as the better design tool?

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.

@clayteller

• My favorite aspect of Sketch is how it helps me create single sources of truth for all the components of my design with json data, symbols, styles, etc. Any plans you can share for making those features even better?

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.

[emanuel (Emanuel Sá)]

@jkilp

Hello! Thanks for doing this AMA, I am looking forward to it, and appreciate the transparency.

I have a question about the plugin ecosystem. I have noticed recently that a lot of really useful plugins are starting to get abandoned. The biggest one that comes to mind is Sketch Runner. The maker of it mentioned that his company has switched to Figma, so he doesn’t have a lot of time to keep Runner up-to-date with the Sketch updates. However, that particular plugin is almost as important as Sketch itself in terms of workflow, so if we were to lose that it would be a big loss.

Are there any thoughts or plans on how to keep the plugin community interested in working with Sketch? Thank you!

Hi!

We’re just now testing internally a feature that’s very comparable to what Runner offered. It’s likely to come out soon, expect more details in this forum, we think you’ll love it!

[pieteromvlee]

@xianhetao

I really want to know, how to change the subscription payment model from monthly payment to annual payment?

If you contact our support team they’ll be happy to help you with queries like that

[pieteromvlee]

@alecvse

A lot has changed in that time, and you have to admit that now Sketch is no longer the leader in design tools, and that Figma is winning the battle for most designers. In this context, how do you see your future in the next three to five years? Are there concerns that the situation might reach a point where it is no longer profitable for you to develop Sketch? And how has the fact that you reduced your team by 50% last year affected you?

We’re confident that there’s market for a discerning design tool like Sketch. Also, I would argue the market is big enough that multiple tools can thrive here, and I think we can do that. Regarding our recent round of layoffs, we felt that this was needed to survive and thrive long-term. We wanted to go back to our roots as an independently run company, not one that has to continue to raise money from investors to fund the next stage. We wanted to focus on designers, and the tool we love, not about burning money and always be raising for the next round. We got into this business to build a great app, and that’s what we’re doing.

[emanuel (Emanuel Sá)]

@wwwedran

Hello! I use and support Sketch for many years now. Love its openness, high quality native app, being focused and specialized (no bloat!) and attention to details. It is one of the rare alternatives to Adobe’s tools.

Currently design tools are still more optimized for drawing interfaces than they are on generation. With new AI tools we are seeing potential for less manual work by designers allowing us more time to focus on thinking, exploring and focusing on the bigger picture. But even before that there are ways to make features and tools smarter.

I’m interested to hear how you see modern design tools evolving in the next couple of years and how you see Sketch in that context?

Thank you!

Hello,

Thanks for the kind words! We have already elaborated a bit in other answers on how hard it is to look far ahead, but I share your interest in AI tools and what they may unlock. We don’t have something to share about this right now, but we will no doubt explore it in the future.

For now, there’s many things that we’d love to do that don’t involve chasing the latest hype. We always deliberately separated the Mac app experience out from the Web, believing we could offer a superior experience when you cater to a specific audience; the designer in the Mac app or other stakeholders through the web app. I’d personally like to do more with fostering that conversation and building great tools for sharing feedback beyond Annotations (which we’ve across all our tools with the last update).

[pieteromvlee]

@arnom

• Why not organizing events/conference every year (or every 6 months) to give to your users (and all the world) a kind of roadmap and/or presenting new key features.

While I love the idea, we’re only a small company, just focussed on building a better product. We’re independent and do not have the deep pockets to be able to organise these style of conferences. We think we can reach enough Sketch users online, through our existing channels that an in-person conference risks being just a bit of a vanity project if you see what I mean.

@arnom

• Lots of people are talking about the “war” between Sketch and Figma, are you considering it’s a war ? Sketch seems to have different strategy so I’m not really sure it’s a real war.

Hello! We think the market is big enough for multiple players. People love to have a war/fight between companies; Microsoft vs Apple, iOS vs Android, Xbox vs Playstation, but we try not to focus on that and just build a better tool.

We trust there’s people who value our approach, but if for some reason you prefer Figma, that’s fine with us. Competition keeps everybody sharp, so I just hope that people can forego the rivalry and choose camps, and instead enjoy that there’s competition, which makes design tools better for everybody.

@arnom

• Why not making Sketch a different tool with its owns killer features, you don’t need to copy other but to innovate. Is it in your plans ?

If you’re comparing with Figma, yes there’s a lot of feature we both have. Some were copied one way, others the other way round, but the end of the day both Figma and Sketch give you a great design environment, Libraries, Prototyping Smart/Auto Layout, real-time collaboration and more.

But I would also argue it’s quite a distinct tool already. In a small way, a distinction I’d draw attention to is our Smart Layout feature. I encourage you to check out the latest sketch beta, and check the experimental features tab in the preferences. You can enable Smart Layout there inside groups (eg, outside Symbols), and it’s quite distinct from Figma’s approach. We believe that the layers on the canvas should just be freely manipulatable, you shouldn’t have to dump everything in rigid nested stacks just to get some layout smarts.

In a bigger way, we offer a different experience for designers versus other stakeholders, and we believe this is a good thing; for someone not familiar with the design system, the symbols, may just accidentally change something they didn’t intend to, while at the same time you don’t want to dumb down the experience for designers, if everybody lands in the same app, then it has to work well-enough for everybody and that means compromises. We like our approach. I could go on, but you get the idea.

[emanuel (Emanuel Sá)]

@vincent

Hi Sketch founders,

Just a question on for how (much) longer will those happy with their legacy Mac-only licensees get to continue renewing such license?

As a software developer myself, I agree that subscriptions better guarantee sustainability, but I personally do prefer perpetual licenses, even if it meant higher prices, and reduced functionality.

Probably someone else will appreciate perpetual licenses too, as we see in the cases of Adobe CS6 and LR5/6 in the past.

If the founders don’t mind sharing, I would like to hear on their perspective on the Mac-only license.

Now, regardless of future licensing methods, I will continue to support Sketch, as it’s a great software for designing, just more of a, wanting to know about, kind of a thing.

Hello Vincent,

For now we’re keeping the model around but we really think long-term, subscriptions, are the future. It really comes down to a subscription best serving the ongoing development, maintenance and the last few years also server hosting costs.

Many (larger) customers also even prefer a model they know, eg a subscription, rather than this unique model that only Sketch really has. But again, offering features such as shared document storage, real-time collaboration, and handoff, these do not come free, and so a subscription aligns best with running Sketch as a sustainable business.

[pieteromvlee]

@Dave

Q1 - When will Smart Layout be brought to the Artboard level? From what I can see the new Group Level Smart Layout feature is amazing (Experimental feature: Smart Layout in groups - #5 by eurlichallan ).

As you said, we’re working on it! It’s in our latest beta and we’re really liking the way it’s shaping up. It’s incomplete in its current state and you can expect it to become more full-featured before we release it. I will link again to Experimental feature: Smart Layout in groups to encourage everybody to give it a go

@Dave

Q2 - When can (or if) we expect to see Symbol Variants?

I can’t tell you when yet, but it’s on our list. First step we’re tackling is building a prototype player which is in theory capable or more ‘localised’ changes, which is currently in development. There’s little point in Symbol Variants if they’re not supported in Prototypes. So keep your eyes on the forum for further developments in this area.

[freddiewrites (Freddie Harrison)]

Hey everyone Thanks for your great questions! We’ve closed this topic now all the answers are in and we hope you found it informative. For those of you who missed out, I’m sure we can persuade Pieter and Emanuel to do this again some time at a later date.