Comment by Fraterkes
6 days ago
I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
6 days ago
I recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop. Only a step away from using something like blender or after efffects tbh. It was also mac only. And desktop only. It turns out design is one of those things that people like to see, and is not insrcrutable like code. So stakeholders asked to see your ui and you would send them... this file. They would then have to download the application, and deal with all the joys that come with different platforms, asking how to install the thing, security complians, licenses, etc.
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
> Sketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop
No before the current iteration there was Fireworks, then the smaller web apps for wireframe prototyping (Balsamiq, etc).
Professional Designers used inDesign for bigger portals or complex and vast UIs. Or AI for the prototypes.
Photoshop lacked good vector tools and comprehensive styling of corpus.
You've got all the players named, but I do believe there was a time inbetween where Sketch was noteworthy, if not as a market leader, then as the most notable rising star.
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For those who are not as skilled in design, "AI" refers to Adobe Illustrator. :)
Never seen anyone design UIs in InDesign. Mostly they would go for Illustrator or Fireworks.
> It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
I know that I'm in a small/medium European company (~400 people total), generally very mindful of how we spend money but this is the exact billing model that would turn us away because too expensive for the features actually used.
Wouldn't say it's just that.
- Design sharing was great and easy, yeah. - Autolayout easily won over folks who didn't wanna learn Sketch - Sketch was moving too slow at a critical time, leaving a lot of ground uncovered for Figma to jump in
But most important:
It was free.
Sketch also had a cloud service for sharing designs and prototypes, and commenting on them.
You could also get a constraints plugin for Sketch. That’s built-in on Figma.
That model reminds me of Gitlab. You need all these features so a seat has to be expensive. But you need a seat for even the smallest interaction with repos, whether you’re a dev or you just want to raise issues. Left a bad taste in the mouth.
It took this comment for me to realize Figma is not Sketch. I thought Sketch rebranded or got bought up by Figma. Never realized they are two different apps.
I've used Sketch since its early days and then after (who knows how many) years, reluctantly and angrily moved from Sketch to Figma. Sketch was the pioneer and Figma took a very long time to catch up with what I've considered important features, and of course Figma had the advantage of being cross-platform but that was a non-issue for me as Sketch introduced web-based previews for clients.
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
Sketch's biggest drawback was they only build a Mac app. The "mac app" space will get you consistent business but you will never grow your company to the scale of Figma or Adobe.
It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.
The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.
And yet, I cannot stop myself of thinking about that native architecture decision whenever my beefed up Mac Studio takes a minute to load a mediocre-sized Figma project and struggles to keep up as I try to navigate it, just so that I can leave a couple of comments somewhere.
I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.
I don’t have the entire history of the two apps in front of me, but Sketch was definitely first, and from what I recall, Figma copied them, at least initially.
Macromedia Fireworks was the modern predecessor of these tools that ushered web graphics back in the dot com days. It was bought by Adobe, and shuttered around 2009.
I loved that tool
Still keep a machine on Mojave to use FW CS 6 and will probably eventually have a VM running it to use it, it’s a distinctive combination of features.