There are many design and wireframe tools out there, so why should you choose Sketch?

What is Sketch?

Sketch is a tool made specifically for digital design. It has a low learning curve and since it is designed specifically for digital products, on the design side, it isn’t bloated with a lot of extra photo editing and print graphics tools, like Photoshop or Illustrator. On the UX side, it understands what tools you need at your fingertips to efficiently make and update wireframes.

Why should you use it?

Sketch is fully vector based, but still allows you to design on artboards with a pixel grid and it allows you to easily export to different devices and screen resolutions.

Sketch understands that to complete a project you will need many screens and allows you to have an unlimited amount of pages with unlimited artboards on an infinitely large screen. So basically, there is no limit to the amount of screens you can create and organize in whatever way makes most sense for you. It also knows that many of your screens will have similar styles and symbols and makes it easy to share, update and resize these shared elements. Sketch allows you to create a style guide for your text and colors. Whenever you add a new element to your page, you can quickly select from these predetermined styles. This comes in handy when you need to change all of the body copy in your app from 12pt to 14pt. It’s also helpful when you need to change all of the blue on your site to orange.

Sketch allows you to turn any object into a symbol. Added an extra page to your site and now need to update your navigation on 30 pages? Just make sure your navigation is a symbol and it’s not an issue. Nested symbols are now available and the ability to override any text, image, or symbol within your symbol is incredibly powerful.

On top of all this, Sketch is open source and there is a huge online Sketch community that is constantly creating plugins to make your workflow easier. There are plugins out there to help get your desktop wireframes 80% of the way there for mobile without you doing a thing. There’s the craft plug-in which syncs with Invision to quickly create prototypes of your work. Craft even has ways to easily populate your page with dummy content, both images and text, based around topics.

Go try it for yourself!

The only real way to see if Sketch would be right for you, is to try it for yourself. It comes in at $99, but also offers a free trial at https://sketchapp.com/. Check it out and let me know what you think!