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Figma vs. Adobe XD: How we picked our next design tool
The time came for changes and our design team started raising the topic again about how we should consider moving away from Sketch. This is not the first time this question came to mind, but this time seems like it was serious. Last summer we considered changing Sketch to something else, but at the time the decision was made that it is not worth the hassle. We decided to wait until this tool will catch up as some of us honestly believed in the future of it.
For Telesoftas designers it is a second revolution — the first big one was a long time ago a move from Photoshop to Sketch. At the time it seemed like an enormous deal and the progress of something revolutionary. Now this time we can call it the second design revolution and the next big change.
Prehistory of Sketch and why the change is needed
Most of the team got used to Sketch and it was a really praised tool at the beginning of transition. We were excited about how easy it is to use, sharing with others tips and tricks, shortcuts. What I liked about Sketch at first was symbols and how you can have nested symbols inside. It helped to save many hours; we improved consistency and sped up the entire workflow. However, while working on bigger projects I saw serious performance issues when Sketch started crashing often. Some work got lost and it was a tedious process which tested your nerves.
Collaboration was really a pain and for that you have to use plugins, other services to be in sync with other designers. It was not working perfectly and sometimes we were resolving conflicts when we tried to push designs to the service cloud from the plugin. That when a design tool requires so many other services to be functional at its minimalistic level is outrageous. For design sync we used Plant, for sharing designs with clients or PMs Invision, for creating animations Principle and for sharing with developers Sympli. Sometimes also Anima to create smart adaptive layouts. Since Sketch is the industry-standard tool the missing product features created a lot of opportunities for new businesses to arise.
