Sketch 43: This Changes Everything

Chris Thelwell explores the open file format update to Sketch and looks at how it will change the way designers work forever

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On 6 April 2017, Bohemian Coding released an update to its popular design tool, Sketch 43. Designers around the world hailed it as a game-changer for the design tool industry. But the launch passed without the massive fanfare you’d expect for something so big, leaving most designers wondering what had actually changed and why it was so significant. So let’s explore the changes that were introduced and see if Sketch 43 really is the game-changer it claims to be.

GAME-CHANGER FROM DAY ONE

To understand the impact of Sketch 43, we have to go back in time. On 7 September 2010, Bohemian Coding – a small two-year-old company in The Hague, Netherlands – unveiled Sketch to the design community. At the time, designers mainly used Adobe’s Creative Suite of applications. The relationship between designers and Adobe went back years, and persuading them to shift to a new tool was seemingly impossible. For years, designers had to live with constraints, workarounds and hacks to make Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator work for them. But Sketch was different. Bohemian Coding built Sketch from the ground up with the needs of modern digital designers in mind. Higher resolutions, pixel perfection and consistent styles and patterns were built in. Plus an open-sourced API allowed a community to emerge building plug-ins and tools to make it even better.

But the real game-changer was the price. Sketch launched with a much smaller price tag (less than £100) than Adobe charged for its subscription model.

After a slow start, Sketch started to get traction in the design industry and a community of advocates grew around it. Fast-forward seven years and almost every designer I know uses Sketch as their go-to design tool.

REVISED FILE FORMAT