Hi! Returned User here. Simple Question. Sketch VS Designer

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I am a big fan of Sketch and still use my 2020 version. The latest updates are tempting me to upgrade this year. However, I have also discovered the Affinity Apps, and they have become an essential part of my daily design routine. They have made me consider giving up Adobe CC for good this year. I mainly use Affinity Designer and Sketch for similar projects such as website and app design, as well as social media ads and flyers. The core of my business is Branding Management, and my team and I work hard to cover all areas of a business and consolidate its brand identity across all materials. We are very focused on graphic manipulation and design, with minimal emphasis on programming and languages such as html/css3/php/java for server interactions and text editing iterations.

Are Sketch and Designer essentially identical tools? Although both are very capable, I find that Affinity Designer offers some extremely useful features that I rely on heavily. For instance, the ability to edit one artboard on a document and have all others mirror the changes instantly, as well as the Export Persona feature, which allows me to obtain files for web or app development in various formats and resolutions with a single click. I cannot stress enough how valuable these features are once you get used to them.

On the other hand, Sketch excels in its well-designed grid system, which gives me the confidence that everything will look good and be in its place when building a website or an app. I am aware that I can adjust the grid settings in Affinity Designer to achieve similar results, but there is something unique and user-friendly about Sketch that keeps me coming back to it every day.

If you have experience using both apps, I would greatly appreciate your insights on what makes Sketch superior in app and web design compared to Designer. Lately, both apps have started to feel redundant to me, and I am seeking to streamline my tools to avoid having multiple iterations of the same functionality. Thank you in advance.

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Hi Albert!

Welcome you the Forum! It’s great to have you here and thank you for taking the time to share this feedback and questions. There are several things here so I’ll go through each one separately

Are Sketch and Designer essentially identical tools?

I’d say they are essentially different. They are both design apps, both can edit vectors, but you only need to open them and see how differently they are conceived and designed, how each tool sees the creative process. And of course, it’s good that they are different.

Sketch is a Design platform for creating things as varied as UI, Interaction design and UX deliverables. I’m using some big terms here, but Sketch can power all these and help you create icons, UI Kits, Design Systems or gather user feedback from prototypes so you can refine your design and later on, share it with developers so they can extract specs from the Web app.

From my personal experience, I see Affinity more close to Illustrator than Sketch. It has a lot of features for print and illustration with some really cool stuff as well.

If your core business is branding, Sketch can really boost your workflow with things like symbols, color variables, libraries and the sharing features from the Web app.

The example you mention where you edit an artboard and mirror the changes to others can also be done in Sketch! Just select all the artboards you want to edit and enter the new dimensions or click and drag to resize them:

 

About exporting, Sketch can also help here with export presets. You can save the formats and resolutions you need @2x, @3x, etc and load the presets as needed!

artboardPresets

 

Things that set Sketch apart

One thing that sets Sketch apart is how easy and manageable it is to create reusable elements. Symbols, layer styles, artboard templates and color variables are very useful and when set as a library, you can turbocharge your workflow and save a lot of time down the road.

For branding work, you could create templates for UI Kits or base palettes for dark and light mode and each one of these can be a library, so you can also use them for creating deliverables consistently. Here’s a quite useful blog post about creating libraries

Nowadays we have this very big term, Design Systems, but brand manuals are a form of Design System that has been around for quite a while, and these can be created and maintained in Sketch!

What do you think so far? Have you tried these features? How did it go?

Cheers!

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Hello Jorge,

Thank you for your response. I thoroughly enjoyed your well-crafted post. Your insights on the nuances between Affinity Designer and Sketch were enlightening. Indeed, Affinity Designer is often likened to Illustrator, but its unique capabilities make it stand out as quite formidable in its own right. My query on simultaneous editing across different artboards was about the ability to alter multiple panels at once, as shown here: MultiEditing.mp4 - Droplr.

Additionally, I appreciate features like Symbols, Layer styles, and the asset libraries, not to mention the style picker tool — it’s fantastic for applying uniform styles across various elements, such as buttons on different artboards.

I realize I need to immerse myself more fully in Sketch to utilize its entire range of design features effectively. Up to this point, I’ve primarily been using Sketch to refine and finalize designs initially created in Affinity Designer, perhaps out of habit or from a sense that doing so somehow ‘validates’ the final product before I send it off to clients or agencies.

I often create SVGs in Affinity, then transfer them to Sketch, and sometimes I’ll convert web designs to PDF for final adjustments in Sketch. While I find design work intuitive and speedy using Affinity’s beloved tools, Sketch impresses with its precision and clarity for final project touches.

I’m in a bit of a dilemma, trying to discern whether to choose one application as an all-encompassing tool or to continue leveraging both in my workflow. Sketch has been a mainstay from the beginning, and I have a deep personal connection with it. I’m going to attempt to manage everything with Sketch going forward and will keep you updated on that journey.

Thanks once more for your valuable feedback!

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Hey Albert!

Thanks for this update. I’m very happy to read that you found my post useful.

Wow! That multi edit in Affinity is really nice! I didn’t know you could do that there, thanks for sharing!

I don’t know how you get it done in Affinity, but you can do it in Sketch with Symbols. Basically, you set your text symbol source and when you edit it, changes are propagated to all your instances. Take a look

Here’s the sample file as well, let me know what you think!
Multi edit demo file.sketch (4.7 MB)

I’d love to hear how it goes managing your projects and workflow in Sketch! And of course, we’re here to help with any questions or feedback! :raised_hands: