How Figma got under my skin

I have been hardcore fan of Sketch since it has been released. It has been a revolutionary product that made UI and UX process much easier for all digital designers out there. As the time went by, I have been noticing other applications popping up, such as Figma, Adobe XD, etc., but never really paid much attention to them, not to think of switching! However, times have changed, my team expanded and processes on certain project have become more complicated with Sketch. Here is the story of how a hardcore fan can be turned to the competitors.

Beginning of the end 🔚

Sketch has brought an amazing opportunities to the world of digital product creation with functionality of symbols, overrides, advanced layout and so on. Its user flow is remarkably easy to get used to and anything you might need is at ready at all times. I have personally fallen in love with the simplicity and speed with which you were able to deliver a finished design. And if you count in all the plugins that were supported by Sketch, you got one hell of a tool to work with. It was just powerful! Until…

It took me some time, but since I have become more curious about competition (of any product I am using) I have decided to conduct a research and audit of Figma and Adobe XD. What I have found was very shocking to me — both were already either at the same level or ahead of Sketch in its core functionality! Now, this was at the beginning of 2018 and the fuzz was still all around Sketch. However, I started to feel the itch you can’t scratch and something was telling me, that this might be the beginning of the end for Sketch.

From leader to follower 🥶

In June 2018 I have started at a company KENDAXA that primarily used Sketch as it designing tool. I was very happy about that since I knew my way around already, knew how to use symbols and its overrides — all-in-all, it was a good news that I will not have to switch to something I don’t know. It is important to say here, that I do have a problem with change since I was a kid. By that time, Sketch has released its Cloud and library usage already, so what could be better, right? What I did not know was that Figma had already component usage at ready as well. It is also worth mentioning that, at that time, we were not allowed to use any Cloud based solutions to share our work. It was the company’s policy, therefore we had to share the libraries via our server which became a nightmare. Why? Because we started building a new Design System and collaboration was of essence! (More on that later)

Anyway, libraries, reusable components, prototyping — this was all already in the competitors applications! Not to mention that Figma was free and Adobe XD would be free for us as well (since we had Creative Cloud licenses). I started to questioning Sketch and as I always do, I started looking for advantages of the app I am using. Problem was, I did not found any, only the one that I am already used to the app. Nonetheless, all the other apps were already caught up with Sketch and one in particular was making its run for the number one designing tool with its collaboration tool — Figma!

Real-time collaboration becomes a “Must-have” 💪

It’s been more than year and a half since I’ve been given the lead of design team at KENDAXA. Since then, I have started to understand that the collaboration tool needs to come soon to Sketch, otherwise we will go nuts. Moreover, we started to gain more of a good reputation and new projects started flowing into the company and design was essential for those projects. More than one designer now had to work on one file, which made it really difficult to do with just Sketch.

Creation of libraries to be used across all the designers without Cloud became a real nightmare. We had essentially no way to keep everyone in loop of the recent changes, not to mention that if one designer was to take over a certain part of the project, s/he had no way to get the hang of it, because in the amount of version shared around it became too messy. It was now given — we need to find a way to collaborate that is not a pain in the a#*.

Sketch trying to catch up 😈

To my surprise, Sketch has recently released a version called Sketch for Teams. This one promised better collaboration within the team, with data updates on certain symbols and organisation on the cloud. It was time for us to go for the cloud based solution and it so happened that I was able to convince the management of its advantages. They said yes and I started to believe in the bright future of the Sketch as it appears that they finally got the gist and started to work on the collaboration module of the app.

Well, not really… 🤬

Yes, I was mistaken. What the Sketch for Teams provides is just a way to organise your files and keep track of the versions of Sketch files that you upload, comment on them, as well as providing a new way to pay for the licenses. Essentially, it is a Google Drive for Sketch.

This was it for me. After three years, I have definitively decided to switch a tool to the one that I found to be an absolute killer of Sketch — Figma! I realised it is more convenient for team, developers and everyone in the company as they can access our files through a simple link (which you can do in Sketch for Teams too), comment on it, possibly make some changes with a free version of Figma, not to mention the real-time collaboration functionality!

Are you in charge of a team? I say, Figma! ☝️

I believe that Sketch is still a great tool to use with its integration to InVision, easy to use interface and features that are living up to the industry standards. But that’s all it is… A tool that is trying to catch up is not a tool that makes it on the market. Figma has gotten far ahead of Sketch and is bringing all and more than we are looking for as a team. It provided most of the Sketch for Teams functionality nearly from the beginning of its existence, it caught up with the rest of what was making Sketch unique, making it (in my opinion) the number one tool to use for designing.

Thanks for reading! 🙏