Hey community, I need your help.
I’m interested in learning more about how you collaborate and share work with your team. Do you use features like real-time collaboration or commenting in Sketch? Or do you rely on other methods? Or a combination.
Feel free to share examples of your collaboration processes. I’d appreciate it!
Oh, this is my favorite question!
To begin with, I showcase my design on Sketch Cloud. There, nobody uses comments as it requires registration, and my team seems conservative in that regard. After the approval and finalization stages of the design, the most interesting part begins - handing over the design to developers. Since Sketch has the worst implementation of Developer Handoff, I often have to manually mark elements that are possible for export. And quite often, I forget to mark something. For this, I create a design system, export everything to a folder, and upload it to Google Drive, where the “assets” for developers are stored. Sometimes, neither I (manually exporting all the necessary graphics) nor the developers (dealing with the inconvenient Developer Handoff) have the patience, so I just import the design into Figma and don’t waste time on routine work.
I don’t want to come off as toxic or mean with this message; I want to point out the problems that have remained unresolved in Sketch for years. Unfortunately, Sketch doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes, but I still love working in Sketch simply because it feels like a native macOS application.
Alright,
First off, thanks for the comments.
Second, what makes you say we have the worst implementation of Handoff? We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about where we can improve the experience and make it fit more what our users are expecting from it.
Hey @funkie
Thanks for taking the time to share your collaboration process! First of all, I’m sorry to hear about the hurdles you have to take to collaborate in the best way for you and your team.
Although slightly confronting for us, it’s helpful to read these cases and to read where we can improve the collaboration part in Sketch. Thanks. And as Raul indicated, I’d love to hear more about the handoff part.
To others reading, feel free to share their processes as well and the possible hurdles you have to take.
Sure!
As I mentioned earlier, a common issue is the lack of export availability for an element unless I manually mark it as exportable, and even then, I have to choose the format. Ideally, a designer should have knowledge of the front-end of a web project to understand what can be implemented, but Sketch is primarily oriented towards designers, aiming to simplify design processes and allow designers to focus on creativity.
Developers, on the other hand, have a different approach. They assess the design and implementation possibilities from their perspective, knowing better which graphics to export and what can be achieved with clean coding. To provide context, I started with designing simple HTML pages and progressed to React and Three.js frameworks, understanding how to implement my UI design ideas. However, my thinking may differ from that of developers, leading to frequent requests for design changes, making certain elements exportable separately, consuming time.
There’s also the challenge of exporting an image from a Shape.
Another issue is the lack of (or rather, the non-obvious presence of) layer navigation in the layout. Even after showing developers screenshots of how to navigate layers, not everyone understands the system. It feels like inventing a new interaction method that requires learning, despite the existence of widely known and used ui patterns.
The third issue is the inability to comment without registration. I believe leaving an email for feedback should be sufficient. The entry barrier should be kept as low as possible.
My message is to make developers and managers love Sketch as much as I do 
Thanks a lot for expanding on this. They’re all valid points. We’ll take a look at them!
The third issue is the inability to comment without registration.
This is something we’ve also talked about internally and could be something we look into eventually