I wasn’t able to give feedback for the conversation on the future of Sketch. I just wanted to add a couple points about where Sketch has been positioned in the last couple of years.
I can’t understand how companies with only one product can compete against larger suites of design tools in the long run. I’m not saying they have to be apart of something that is Adobe-sized enormous. I just mean to be a useful tool it should really be closer to a company with at least a medium number of titles. Prototyping should only be one subset of an overall package. When you look at the early prototyping software like Fireworks that single piece of software wasn’t going head on against Adobe. They had about a five product suite to attempt to do that.
Hey Kendall I hope you don’t mind, but I moved your topic to the Off-topic category, as it felt like a better fit than Share an idea.
Thanks for your thoughts, also! As Pieter and Emanuel mentioned in the AMA, we believe the market is big enough to support multiple tools, so for us it’s not so much a case of wanting to compete against Adobe. It just so happens that we both happen to make software for designers.
I personally also think there’s value in specialism, and being the right tool for specific types of work. Some people will find value in Sketch and what we offer, others will need a different set of tools, and that’s okay!
I enjoy the focused-nature of Sketch—I want them to refine and innovate what they have, not feel the need to cover every competitive bulletpoint
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@kylehalevi Then I think you’ll like where we’re headed
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I also think there is a value in specialism. When large companies take on too many products it often means each title isn’t given enough care. On the flip-side when companies go to completely the other direction and stay extremely small they can have troubles filling their one specific niche. For an example I was working on my latest site it has a lot of illustration elements but I noticed Sketch struggles at opening semi-complex EPS files. I had to switch over to Affinity Designer whenever I needed to use one of those files.
As I go between Sketch and Designer it often seems like the strength of one software title fills in the weakness of the other. It would be critical for smaller companies to team up to provide what the other lacks. I am not saying that one product should replace the other, they each provide their own niche and work side by side. For example the new file sharing and commenting features that Sketch just introduced would be helpful in some of the Affinity apps.
My view of Adobe in this area is that they have had a lot of tries to come up with prototyping solutions and don’t ever seem to get it quite right. Hence all the buyouts. I think Figma is the fourth attempt they have made. At this point another company needs to figure it out. Adobe is far to gone at this point.
The “lock you out of your files” licensing way of distributing software is dated. It doesn’t take in many considerations. Over the years I have been burned by too many companies that would promise something and don’t deliver after I have already paid them. I’ve stopped doing that. Yet again when it comes to distribution Affinity’s Universal license hits the bullseye. You can buy multiple products on three platforms, no wonder Affinity 2 sales have exploded and went far beyond the companies expectations.
Of course they are somewhat limited when it comes to a full prototyping solution. The first company that can put out a package that approximates the medium sized Adobe packages from a number of years ago will bring back an incredible solution again. The three products in Affinity is still just a bit small but having only one product is insane. It might have made sense starting out but now fourteen years later the need to more about filling in the gaps Sketch doesn’t provide in a more full suite.
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