dwsign

So long Adobe

I have been using Sketch for 8 months now and these days I hardly open a creative cloud app. I look at the bloat and the subscription and then looked elsewhere.

So here's my opinion on the best out there for web design.

Sketch

There is so much to love about Sketch. It's got a clean UI and a fast start-up time. I love the breakpoint artboard templates you work in. How you can alter the size of the template easily (so many times I have to lengthen my templates); You can feel the design coming together all in one place, envisage problems that may arise from your decisions and deal with them. It’s also has a very clean menu that you can pick up how to use very quickly, and great export feature that seems to best even much older products (looking at you adobe)There is no tool bloat here.

It also presently has a great offer on with Invisonapp - a years subscription to create working hotspot design mockups with them is a very nice bonus.

Now for the misses with Sketch. It's buggy. So many times you select an item on the artboard - you try on jog it using the arrow keys - but it doesn't move? Wha?! You zoom in/out - perform the same arrow key gesture and it does. #Infuriating.

Grouping items. Why on earth can you group a set of items - then regroup & regroup and so on that same group? The program should just say no - you cannot do that.

Now onto my next new piece of software.

Affinity Designer

This just feels like Illustrator - but at a 5th of the price. It feels good as an illustrator replacement but not as a web design tool. I was hoping that Affinity would be able to challenge my sweet spot of Sketch due to hearing that it was mature and less buggy was a real incentive. But it is a tool that cannot conquer my love of Sketch - the reasons being: You cannot just select the artboard and resize (something I love in Sketch). It does have all the preset templates - but to grow your template requires menu selection to do so.

Affinity does not have a single document with multi artboards arrangement at present - a deal breaker for me.

But then I got to thinking - could this replace Illustrator? And the answer is yes. It feels lightweight and nimble, it costs a fraction of what the subscription service is and it does so without taking up a vast amount of drive space or memory allowance. All good in my book so worth the money I spent on it.

Oh - one more thing - The icon needs redesigning. It is not focused enough. I struggle to find it within my dock.