Live Q&A: Daniel Schwarz on Sketch 3. June 2nd, 1PM (PST)

Hey all!

We have a big day ahead of us on Thursday June 2nd at 1pm (PST), as Daniel Schwarz joins us for a chat about Sketch 3. Does his name ring a bell? If you’re an avid SitePoint visitor, you may already be familiar with his design and web articles or Jump Start Sketch book on SitePoint Premium. You may have already seen him on the forums as @mrdanielschwarz!

If you’ve been considering Sketch 3 or have already been working with this tool but have a few questions for a Sketch professional, Thursday is your day! Daniel has the smarts to answer all your questions, and get you up and running.

Mark the date on your calendar and get your questions ready for the event. Check to see when this event is taking place in your timezone. But don’t worry if you can’t make the event, get ahead of the crowd and leave your questions below. We’ll get around to them during the event.

See you there!

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Hey @mrdanielschwarz, thanks for doing this Q&A on the forums :slight_smile:
In case I’m not around for the event itself, I’ll leave my question for you:

What are the really big stumbling points in Sketch that you see people having who are coming from an Adobe background? I’m not a graphic designer, but when I do image or design work at all, I’m using Sketch now when dealing in designs and vectors (And sometimes Pixelmator for more of image-editing), and coming from a PS/Illustrator Windows use previously. Any tips?

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Hi there, I am an adobe user but I haven’t missed the hype about Sketch, can you please discuss why sketch is a better tool than Illustrator from personal experience? I have read the blogs and articles but nothing besides the price has really convinced me to make the switch. Thank you.

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Hey Dan, I’ve followed you for a while now and have a few quick questions - sorry if they’re a little off topic! :slight_smile:

I know you’re a serial nomad and have travelled around quite a bit, do you ever imagine you’ll settle down somewhere, and if so, where?

Quite a few devs and designers now lead the digital nomad life, I know you previously resided in England so there wasn’t any proximity issues to the rest of Europe. Why did you become a nomad and what inspires you to lead that life?

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@mrdanielschwarz thanks so much for doing this Q&A event! I have a question that isn’t Sketch related but still design related. I do however love Sketch for the brief time I’ve used it. As a web developer it makes much job much easier to get elements from it compared to Photoshop.

My question is where do I begin in making a design for a personal website that I want to create? It’ll have a blog, portfolio of work, code repository (like CodePen), resource page, about me page and contact page. I don’t think I’ll have a problem with the internal pages but I’m stumped on what to do for a home page that I’ll be able to incorporate throughout the website.

Thanks so much for your time!
Greg

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There have been a lot of improvements to Sketch… I just wondered, how is exporting to SVG these days? I read that Illustrator now does a good job of it…

Are there some Grid plug ins or features? A demo?

Kerning type? Preferences for kerning?

I need to read the book!

I think what people like about Sketch is its simplicity of use… very low learning curve, and ease of laying out web pages, logos, or anything else, as well as its simple interface for creating icons or simple designs. It gets better and better! It is my go-to tool … so easy to pull out, find files, no logging in and I like its economy of features… just the essentials.

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Welcome everyone to today’s chat with @mrdanielschwarz!

Daniel is the author of Jump Start Sketch on SitePoint and will be joining us to answer all your questions about Sketch and even a sneaky few on life as a digital nomad.

Welcome, Daniel!

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I think the trick to an efficient workflow in Sketch is to master the keyboard shortcuts and hide the UI (at least the toolbar) when you can. Photoshop has a huge UI (and therefore far too many keyboard shortcuts, some of which seem anatomically impossible!), so that might be hard for first-time Sketch users to understand. They say the best user interface is no user interface at all, so learn the keyboard shortcuts and you’re already halfway there!

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Cheers @angelamolina!

Hi guys. Glad to be here! I’m happy to answer any questions related to design, sketch, digital nomadism, my book, or a combination of all four!

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What are your thoughts on Sketch vs Adobe XD?

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Do you have any tricks in learning the shortcuts or links to awesome resources?

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Cheers! I was recently told that Sketch had some pretty powerful 3rd party plugins. Can you speak on this/or the ones you use and why?

THX.

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Looks very interesting - but -

System Requirements

Sketch 3.6 and above requires Mac OS 10.10 or higher.

Being on Windows, I’m left out in the cold?

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This is true! What are you currently using @mittineague?

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Great question!

Firstly, that depends on the type of work that you do. For digital illustration, or anything you’d consider rather complex, Sketch wouldn’t be suitable. Performance of SVG is favourable in Illustrator, but that isn’t such a big deal in smaller illustrations (icons, etc), which is what you’d use Sketch for. Indeed, the cost of Sketch is amazing for what it does, it’s definitely a high-value tool, but not for serious illustrators. If you were to compare Sketch to anything, it would be the discontinued Adobe Fireworks, which was aimed towards web designers. Need to design and export assets for the web? Sketch can get there pretty quickly. Need to design complex illustrations without losing performance? Illustrator is for you. Hope this helps!

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Yes, sadly. I don’t know much about Windows or Mac development, but as far as I know Sketch uses technology only found in the OS X architecture (whether this is true or not I’ve no idea!). Bohemian Coding have no plans to bring Sketch to Windows as far as I know.

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Windows 10.

I am (yet again) in the process (a struggle) of setting up a virtual machine environment for testing Discourse.

So if Sketch could be run in a VM that could work.

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As well, Sketch is being trumpeted in the UX / UI crowds. In a semi followup to your answer re: Illustrator, how does Sketch measure up against Adobe XD/Experience Design (formerly Comet?) ?

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Loads! Probably hundreds! Plugins can help you accomplish minor or repetitive tasks quickly (although this is the sort of functionality that Sketch adds to the app natively over time), or Sketch can integrate with the other apps that you already use, such as InVision, Framer, Marvel - you can even send your designs into a Slack channel so the team can comment and offer feedback. This reduces the time usually spent trying to make all of your tools get along!

At the moment I’m deadly excited about what InVision are doing - their “Craft” Plugin lets you insert dummy data directly into Sketch layers, and the next release is expected to allow you to prototype user flows directly from within Sketch, although still part of an InVision project. Sketch is whatever you make it, and you make it with plugins!

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