Sketch : A Design Tool Powerhouse

An idea for building an Interaction Design Tool Powerhouse

Every User Interface/Experience designer has a set of tools they use in their process. Over the last 5 years of designing web interfaces, mobile apps and desktop dashboards, I have discovered the toolset most designers use is more or less the same. What is truly synonymous are the steps followed in the design process.

They usually look something like this:

1. Start with some sketches of the idea on a notepad. (with pencil or an iPad Pro)
2. Design a Low Fidelity Prototype. (normally in Sketch)
3. Design a High Fidelity Prototype. (using Sketch)
4. Prototype with Invision. (if you are collaborating with a client or sharing your work with a team).
5. Animation Exploration. (Using Framer, Origami etc)
6. Document with Zeplin or other nifty tool.

There are also many other additional aspects of this process like:

• Creating a Design Language System
• Version Control (using Git)
• and more

Over this past week something dawned on me -

What would it be like if there was one company that owned all tools involved in this Process?

Some clear advantages of this are:

1. Possibly downloading one application that does all these things really really well and not having to export designs across different apps. e.g. from Sketch to Zeplin.
2. Create more advanced versioning tools, collaboration tools, documentation process tools and more.
3. Charging one premuim price for using the “Suite” but also keeping a seperate pricing model for using the tools seperately
4. Community Creation.
5. and more…

A likely candidate to do something of this nature would be Sketch. As the starting point for all things design, it has just the market leverage to do this.

Suggestive ways in which this could be done

Sketch could take up some investment (said very loosely) and acquire/merge with other established tools e.g. Zeplin, Framer, Flinto and Invision etc. They could then monitize these tools through a “Sketch Premium” offer in more or less the same way that Adobe does it with its suite…

Anyway it’s just an idea… What do you think? 🤔