Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chaker Bejaoui

A couple of weeks ago, a news hit the top of Designer News and was titled “Did Adobe buy Sketch?”. It quickly disappeared but you can still get an explanation from Dann Petty on his video “Adobe bought Sketch?!” on his YouTube channel.

The news who disappeared soon after was mentioning a tweet of a screenshot showing Pieter Omvlee, founder of Bohemian Coding (the makers of Sketch), having an Adobe email. It would be like Mark Zuckerberg doing Snaps or Tim Cook working on a PC. It will never happen.

That’s why the news got so much traction. From this screenshot, people started thinking that maybe Sketch had been bought by Adobe which would be a huge deal! But this has been discredited quickly by Pieter Omvlee himself on his Twitter account:

Many people were very happy to see that it wasn’t true. As it happened a lot before, companies acquired by even bigger companies tend to disappear (👋🏽 Sunrise) and users of Sketch don’t want to see it disappear as they don’t want to work with Adobe products.

It would make sense for Adobe to buy Sketch as it turns to be now the main tool used by designers. If it is used by people, it means for Adobe that they lose users so they lose money as well.

But from my point of view, Adobe won’t buy Sketch.

Instead Sketch will buy Figma.

Here’s why.

David vs Goliath

For many years, Adobe software have been the tools of choice for designers:

If you want to do an app or a website? There is an app for that: Illustrator (sorry guys but Photoshop is irrelevant)
If you want to edit a picture? There is an app for that: Photoshop
If you want to create a book or a presentation? There is an app for that: InDesign
If you want to do some motion design? There is an app for that: After Effects
If you want to work on a video? There is an app for that: Premiere Pro

So, they have built tools to make people able to manage every part of creativity for a very long time. I met people who started their career 20 years ago with Photoshop and are still using it today as they know it by heart. They don’t even upgrade to keep their tool as it has always been.
True story.

But the way designers work has changed, and designers haven’t seen that change yet in these tools. More and more designers work on interfaces and there is no specific tool dedicated to this field among the Adobe software. You just have to see the increasing number of available UX/UI designer jobs listed on internet. The need is real.

Adobe, which runs a $6 billion business, has long dominated the design market as a veritable Goliath. But as Pieter and his team at Bohemian saw it, there was very little innovation going on at Adobe.

Sketch is a professional digital design application for the Mac. It’s an app that is perfectly suited for people who design interfaces like websites, mobile UIs, and icons.

Here is their value proposition: providing a tool to people in order to speed up the process of designing any interface whether it is web or mobile.

And guess what? It is a huge success. Most designers I speak to today have moved from Adobe to Sketch. Adobe has been disrupted.

It is now more than a simple tool. It has become the epicenter of a galaxy of plugins orbiting around it. Knowing some of the values Sketch offers designers is the ability to create plugins that suit their specific needs. This has added a great value to some of the missing features in Sketch and increased productivity for designers.

To make it simple, Sketch is like the iPhone. It’s a great tool with strong native functions but once enhanced with plugins, it becomes a tool that you can’t live without.

Adobe strikes back

Unlike the myth, Goliath has one bended knee down but he is not dead.

Adobe seeing the emergence of interface design and a simple and focused design tool like Sketch gradually increasing in popularity as a primary tool for designers is striking back with a new tool: Adobe XD.

Basically it is a Sketch-like app. Adobe XD, allows designers to create, test, and share mockups through a simple and easy to use tool. The purpose of XD is to make the whole UX creation process as easy as possible.

Same same but different.
The user interface is almost an exact replica of Sketch, down to the tiniest details like the names of the tools, or the Artboards. Adobe XD has no hesitation following.

But if you go beyond the user interface and have a look at the roadmap of XD (and if they really achieve what they promise), Sketch will have serious reason to worry.

Availability of XD on Mac and Windows. Sketch is only available on Mac and there is no plan to export it on Windows. Even if most of the design community is working on Mac, 9 of 10 computers out there are running on Windows. Definitely one of the biggest weaknesses of Sketch.
Working with stakeholders. Compared to Sketch which relies on third-party tools such as InVision or Zeplin to collaborate with others, XD will embed all these features as core capabilities. Ok so both provide the same services here. Yes but have in mind that third-party tools are not free so it increases the cost at the end which is one of the main argument put forward by Sketch.
Working with other designers on a same file at the same time. As a designer, you’re not just collaborating with stakeholders, especially on larger projects, you work with other designers to divide and conquer to meet deadlines. Existing approaches for collaboration among multiple designers require splitting work into separate design documents, which ultimately means needing to merge multiple versions of the documents and sharing assets across documents. With the added pain of assembling everything together for final review and delivery, managing a single source of truth is time-consuming and difficult. Here is the function that will make people switching from Sketch to XD. It is a game-changing feature. Yes there is the Picnic plugin which will enable live collaboration on Sketch but it is still in beta and you still have to pay for an additional subscription to a different tool.
Adobe Creative Cloud. The power of Adobe is not to rely only on one single app but on many making the user able to pick up the one he needs when needed. Most of them are interoperable meaning that a work done on one app can be easily exported on another (e.g. Illustrator to After Effects for motion design). In my daily life, Sketch is not the only tool I use. I use Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects and Premiere Pro and I am pretty sure I am not the only one in this case. That’s why using XD will make a lot of sense to a lot of people.

If I were Sketch or Pieter, I’d be scared shitless. Adobe has lost time, users and money but now, it gives everything to catch up as fast as they can. As mentioned earlier, Adobe runs a $6 billion business. It has the ressources (money and people) to make it right and getting back their lost status:
the tool of choice for designers. And be sure that they’ll make it.

So what can do Sketch to keep leading the race?

The solution calls Figma

A new hope

Five years ago, Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University on a whim to become a member of the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.

Twenty young men and women, including Field, were awarded $100,000 that year to drop out of (or take a leave of absence from) college to pursue and develop their idea.

Field knew exactly what he wanted to to do: take on Adobe. After three years of development, his software interface design tool Figma launched on last year on September for desktop and mobile.

Figma at its core is a web app (though it has a desktop wrapper app, like Slack). If you’re like me, that idea makes you nervous at first. It’s hard to make web apps feel convincingly like desktop apps. Also, one of the great things about Sketch is how it feels like a native Mac app.

Overall, Figma does an impressive job of making it work. And here’s the upside: simultaneous collaboration and shared revision history.
Remember the first time you collaborated in Google Sheets? That’s what shared files in Figma are like. Two people can draw at once and you can see in live what the other is designing!
What is practical is that you can share a file without worrying about somebody making a change while you have it open and stepping on your changes, because you’re both just editing the same document.

For many teams, this is a game-changer.

Figma is like Sketch in the browser with real-time collaboration.

This is exactly what Sketch needs.

Both tools are complementary.

The ecosystem that Sketch has built around it is impressive. If you put Sketch together with Craft, InVision and Zeplin, the package suddenly becomes very competitive and attractive. You can go from designing, prototyping, to testing and shipping the ideas. And if on top of that you add simultaneous collaboration, a better shared revision history and a browser app allowing Windows users to play with Sketch, you are still ahead of Adobe.

Currently there are 3 tools facing each other to win the love of designers: Sketch, Adobe XD & Figma.

There is not enough space for 3 big players. Only 2 at the end will remain to hold most of the market share (e.g. Windows/Mac, Android/iOS, Uber/Lyft). Other smaller competitors will share what is left behind.

For sure XD will be one of the two.

If Sketch wants to remain one of the biggest player, it has to buy Figma.

Peace.

Why Sketch will buy Figma was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why Sketch will buy Figma

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