Photoshop vs. Sketch: Web Design Options
by Paul O’Brien
There’s been a fair bit of buzz lately about Sketch, especially whether it’s worth jumping the tried-and-true Photoshop ship in favour of the newbie.
Sketch gains quite a bit by merit of being new and thus novel; the finicky bits that don’t work quite as well as you’d like are less obnoxious than the ones in Photoshop, simply because in Photoshop you’ve been dealing with them for longer. After a number of years, even small annoyances begin to loom large, especially when presented with an alternative that explicitly addresses those annoyances…and whose own annoyances you’ve not yet had time to discover and grow to hate.
That being said, here’s a quick rundown.
Sketch was designed specifically for web designers and UI designers, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that in many areas it surpasses Photoshop’s capabilities. Photoshop, of course, as the name implies, is still at its core a tool for editing photos; UI design has developed as a secondary concern in a way that has not been the case with Sketch.
As a relatively new entry into the design market, Sketch’s creators — the team at Bohemian Coding — are able to adjust to users’ concerns and respond swiftly by releasing app updates; the system as a whole is faster than its at times cumbersome forebear. Adobe, by comparison, is weighed down by years and years of entrenched systems.
With infinite zooming, the ability to easily update on the fly, and a range of exporting options, Sketch skims past Photoshop’s poor slicing tool and exporting assets. The vector-based design that enables easy scaling also has designers raving. Sketch also has a customisable grid system, a highly accurate colour picker, and a range of plugins to enable a variety of additional actions.
On the whole, Sketch is considerably more flexible than Adobe and able to adapt promptly to users’ needs; the app is handy and powerful, and where it falls short, plugins often appear to bridge the gap. It’s also more affordable, with Sketch 3 currently retailing for $99.
Sketch does have a few downsides, however.
The biggest catch is that at present, it’s only available for OSX 10.9+…with Bohemian Coding explicitly ruling out the possibility of developing the app for Windows or Linux. Though popular conception declares that designers all use Macs, this is an overgeneralisation and leaves a number of non-Apple-product designers a bit left out in the cold. Sketch’s limited support also highlights the problem of compatibility on a project where not everyone has Sketch, or is able to use it; Photoshop has been around for so long that it’s an industry staple, but there are potential hiccups lying in wait for cross-platform team projects.
Sketch is also still on the buggy side, which isn’t particularly surprising given that it’s not very old; the crew at Bohemian Coding seem to be dealing with this, however, and it’s likely that subsequent versions of Sketch will become less and less buggy. And, because it is relatively new, there is a learning curve that Photoshop, by merit of being the old and familiar friend, does not have; learning anything new takes time and inevitably generates a degree of frustrations.
Sketch is a tool specifically developed for web design.
If you want to edit photos or create logos, though, stick with Photoshop; that’s its strength. Given how far Sketch has come in only a few short years, it’s likely that it will only continue to grow and improve. But for the time being, you may need to hold on to Photoshop for those things that Sketch doesn’t do.
Have you used Sketch? How do you think it compares to Photoshop? Let us know at hello@thisisfreshface.com.
Originally published at www.thisisfreshface.com on October 10, 2015.
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