Andy Thelwell Yeah, those are great points. I’m aware of those tools and they do look promising. There is always room for innovation, but even as the creator of this post, I do notice that with increased structure and complexity in constraint-based layout design, even though it’s the better approach in the long term as it gets us closer to code and the products we’re designing for, it also increases the barrier to entry.

Sketch hits this sweet spot where it can do many things pretty well, is easy to pick up, has the community support that none of these other tools have, and it’s well integrated with other workflows for prototyping and code-export. Even as these more advanced products do roll out, I think they will live and die by the community’s willingness to adopt them as they weigh out their value proposition against the time investment it would require to make the switch.

Also, it’s that community support that makes Sketch feel like it can catch up just as fast as it needs to. When Adobe XD came out, the standout features baked in were prototyping and intelligent content duplication. Then a month or two later, we got Craft with these amazing add-ons for duplication, JSON imports, Freehand, Library, and Silver Flows (which is now baked in Invision’s Craft plugin).

Then as tools like Antetype and Subform generate buzz, we have an auto-layout solution for Sketch and though maybe not as robust or integrated, it does the trick for a lot of use cases.

But we can agree that no matter which approach we take, it’s a great time for design tooling innovation :)