Quickly replacing the Photoshop for all UI designs, Sketch is an application designed specially for web and mobile designers. Being a lightweight and easy-to-use application, Sketch offers the power one always looks for in a lightweight package. Designed for modern designers, Sketch works better and faster than any other application. Ever since its inception in the year 2012, Sketch has really come into the mainstream with its extremely user-friendly interface that makes it easy to work with multiple artboards and duplicate artboards. Being a MAC compatible application, Sketch is much easier to use and allows adding more interactivity to the website. The flexible features which Sketch has makes website development an easy to accomplish job.
The application comes with both pros and cons along. Let’s take a deeper insight.
Advantages
Multiple Artboards: Sketch artboards allow you to design fixed frames to use as a base for your project. These can be designed on Sketch’s infinite Canvas. While opting for a responsive design, Artboards can be fixed for multiple screen sizes. Artboards behave like a special kind of group and can be automatically resized to accommodate the height and width of the layers which sit inside. This feature is great for designing responsive sites where the only aim is to display web, mobile and tablet version of a page to the client.
UI focused vector design: Screen densities ain’t an issue with Sketch any more. All you need to do is create an artboard similar to the size of the view. Being resolution independent vector design displays themselves in the space offered to them. They can be scaled to whatever size you wish to without losing the quality. There is no image distortion, you can easily enlarge them without distorting. They are ideally suited for detailed illustrative work.
Being in an age of responsive design, designers need to consider HD versus normal definition displays, narrow screen versus wide screen and many other aspects to come up with a design that rescales all formats. With Sketch, you will be easily able to resize objects, which, in turn, saves both time and energy.
Ease in Color Management: Sketch allows you to simply make a color palette on the mood board. Sketch is not burdened with complicated color management support since it would confuse the users.
Granular export: Sketch comes with a large number of features that were acquired earlier only by CS6 applications. One amongst those features is the ability to export individual layers with a few simple clicks. This is one of most critically acknowledged features of Sketch app. Sketch features both an Export button and a keyboard shortcut directly at hand. This functionality allows developers the opportunity to save individual layers to export the objects to let them appear retina friendly. Owing to this feature, the development not only speeds up but also eliminates the overall time and effort required.
Pixel-perfect design: Sketch allows accomplishing pixel-perfect design with an improved quality.
Smart Guides: Smart Guides are used to align different layers all over the web. Developers get the option to easily view the guides and spacing between objects by holding down the ALT key.
Built-in Grids: Another standard feature offered by Sketch is its built-in layout grid. Here you don’t need to rely on a plugin that have makeshift grid which is not really simple to edit. Pinning a transparent layout guide and changing the column sizes is a piece of cake with Sketch.
Tweaking the layout grid is simple here. You just need to go to “View” and then “Layout Settings”. In order to turn off the grid, hit Control+L
Disadvantages
Sketch is bad at Photo editing: Sketch is not the best when it comes to editing the images. Sketch users can only create images at a rate of 72dpi
Only Mac supported: Being only a Mac compatible application, Sketch loses its importance amongst all the Windows users.
Imports are not as good: Sketch has limited support for EPS, SVG and PDF files.
Buggy: While using Sketch application, one might come across applications that are error-free. There might be some versions of Sketch that come with bug fixes and solve issues on macOS Sierra and Mac with Radeon Graphics. Additionally, there are some performance updates that fix crashes and bugs in vector editing.
Why not give Sketch a Try!
Sketch, being very much similar to the Photoshop has more or less features matching. Being a robust design tool, it has completely adapted to the present day design standards. Sketch’s developers have continuously worked to fix bugs in a successful way. So is it the right time to say good bye to Photoshop?
When it comes to designing user-centric websites, Sketch is one important tool that must be opted for. In order to get visually appealing and highly functional Sketch designs, you need to hire a reputed Sketch to HTML conversion provider for websites with a pixel-perfect design and best-in-class user experience.
Author-Bio:
This post has been written down by Nola Arney who is currently working as a Sketch to HTML conversion provider at HTMLPanda. Having years of experience in the field of Sketch web designing and development, she loves to share her knowledge and skills by writing such informative blogs.
