My first foray into digital design was AutoCAD and Solidworks for 3 years in High School, and I loved them. In college, I learned illustrator and photoshop and realized how poor of a job they did at some of the things I took for granted in CAD tools. I even tried to sneak into the engineering labs to use autocad for some of my first GD projects, but had to finally give up and move on. CAD was just not built for graphic design.

Sketch is leaps and bounds ahead of illustrator/photoshop for product design, but I’m really starting to get frustrated with the lack of reusability that it has. Some of their more recent features, such as overrides and group scaling are moves in the right direction, but honestly, they’re really just cop outs that leave me craving more. I mean, pin to corner? Really? Why can I not choose which corner? Resize object? What does that even mean? None of these are truly constraint based design, and even if I do take the time to add them to my sketch files, how do I pass along those specs to development? I’ve started resorting to building my designs in html/css and handing those off to development, so I can actually see my designs in a fluid environment.

Your product has reminded me that we shouldn’t have to deal with all of that. I guess I’ve just stopped realizing that moving one object on 10 screens manually is just not okay, or having to create frankenstyles using mashups of magic mirror, nested symbols, and hidden layers is crazy.

I’m a born skeptic, so I’m not sure how you’ll be able to replace my engrained sketch habits and workflow, but I really hope that you can.