Adobe Illustrator vs Sketch performance (youtube.com)
over 9 years ago from Johan Ronsse, Interface designer at Mono
over 9 years ago from Johan Ronsse, Interface designer at Mono
Like Adobe Illustrator — it will take several versions before Sketch can come in swinging with the big stick. But by then, Adobe will either acquire them or have released updates that steal their thunder.
Yeah.... these loud-mouth Sketch fans are gonna do it to themselves. If they're not gonna shut up on how good Sketch Adobe is gonna take notice and buy their precious tool and destroy it through bad support and super expensive updates.
They can't, they already have an app called "Adobe Sketch“.
Think about how confusing it would be to google if Sketch was acquired… “Adobe Sketch“. “No, the other one!!“.
We were loud mouthed for 10 years yelling at Adobe who continued to ignore us. I even went on site with Adobe and showed them MOCKUPS and UI fixes on the app we wanted. They didn't listen.
Sketch did. Adobe rendering engine in it's products has to support multiple platforms. They write a lot of java. They have design by committee and teams with more managers than engineers. By the time they make a 'sketch' tool we'll all have adapted to needed a toll that builds animations or something fancy. They aren't keeping up and aren't even trying.
Sketch isn't going to sell to Adobe.
Why don't you compare it to Adobe Fireworks instead? It's not an app that is designed to do what Illustrator does.
Maybe try drawing complex iPhone UI in Adobe Illustrator and we'll talk.
*Turn off show pixels in Sketch?
I use Illustrator when I need to create art. I use Sketch when I have to create apps or software.
FYI Show pixels was off. A complex iPhone UI is exactly what this is - a lot of vectors.
It's easy to be vector when you throw away the pixels and work in points. I've used illustrator for 10+ years every single day. Sketch is way, way faster to get work done. I generally don't draw 600 circles on a screen. I do however curse the heavens trying to work with layered art that needs to include bitmaps in illustrator. I use illustrator when I need to create a vector icon to import into sketch.
Sketch has a much better workflow for designing apps. I used to use illustrator. Speed of rending objects is important, but even if objects rendered 500x slower on sketch I still get my design done 10000x faster in Sketch because Illustrator doesn't support the workflow.
I have no problems using UI8's WireframeKit Sketch files. It has a bunch of vectors and artboards as you can see below.
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I use Illustrator to art too, but I prefer Xcode when creating apps tough ;-)
Why don't you compare it to Adobe Fireworks instead?
Fireworks was discontinued in 2012.
Believe it or not, people still use Fireworks. That is, until they discover Sketch, a better alternative.
...or if they aren't on OS X.
beating a dead horse here, but i don't care.
Fireworks is the only product comparable to what Sketch does. Illustrator and sketch are comparing Apple to Oranges.
To be fair, people compare them because some people do use Illustrator for UI design.
Also Sketch and Illustrator are both vector based so it is a very logical comparison. Both programs have similar tools (pen, rectangle, rounded corner rectangle tools), and similar boolean operations as well.
I am starting to use Sketch and I do love it. However, I have run into some really nasty bugs when doing Boolean ops and also it tends to get really slow and hangs on me.
I love the way Sketch has multiple export options and the way it integrates with InVision.
Needless to say I am not unlearning neither Photoshop nor Illustrator anytime soon but I will continue to increase my skillset in Sketch as well. Hope it keeps getting better.
FB //
Why not just stop arguing over what is better. I have my set of tools, just like any other designer.
Its getting boring seeing all these Adobe vs Sketch posts now. Do people really give a crap what other people use?
Amen to that!
…might just throw in a Freehand grenade ;-)
This. Thank you for posting this. It's exactly why I can't get into Sketch (though all the love makes me want to).
I love a lot of the features and workflows, but I can't build anything serious in it. I hope I'm doing something wrong, and when I have a bunch of spare time I'll start digging into tutorials and best practices, if there are any such things yet.
Hm, I was working with our new IA kit yesterday and it has well over 500 elements (including more complex shapes) and didn't experience any slowdown or performance issues on my i5 macbook air..
interesting though
Here's a video from sketch. Will post an illustrator one too for comparison =] https://vimeo.com/99062681
Agreed. I can output JSON of my current sketch document and show a video of performance. I have 20 pages, 20 artboards, average layers on each artboard is 2,000.
Not having any performance issues. However I have run into times in the past with older versions or super nested stuff where it slowed down.
To be totally fair, i went back and actually checked. Illustrator is a bit better. There are more pressing issues to fix in sketch though honestly.
This is definitely a marked improvement over version 2 though
Yes, Illustrator performs better than Sketch. I thought this was obvious to everyone due to the fact that they have 1 million engineers working on it and have been around for 1 million years. Sketch has how many engineers and been around for how long?
A better comparison would be to compare the workflow for doing tasks on both tools. I'm sure with that comparison, Sketch's better UI would win.
I really love to use sketch but only to a point... It slows down really fast and as people have already mentioned, it becomes REALLY SLOW, everything lags behind. I hope future updates will fix the performance issues soon because sketch is a brilliant tool. I have a year old retina macbook.
I don't think I ever even come close to 500+ elements on a single screen.
At that point, I think the proper exercise might be one in restraint.
I would say there is a lot of bad things in Sketch and this is not one of them. At least for me.
Of course, their speed is limited by Objective-C and CoreGraphics which they use.
Skala promises OpenGL renderer so it should match in performance Illustrator.
Again the difference isn't something your going to notice. CoreGraphics is getting a major overhaul soon too.
Again the difference isn't something your going to notice.
Please run some tests when we release our beta.
How soon? =]
I wish I knew! We’re working as fast as we possibly can.
If you want better performance go here and write about it, guy from BC are active there and right now they asking what are most wanted features we will like to see next.
It's like the iPhone vs Android, Xbox vs Playstation*, Mac vs PC all over again. I use both apps, and I love them equally.
Have you tried that with other shapes? I'm not familiar to Sketch but what I wonder is maybe drawing a circle/curve like shape is not optimized in sketch because it requires some other work. Does it change if you try squares instead of circles?
Circle is one of the harder shapes it draws.
Sketch is miles (kilometres) ahead of the next best UI/Icon design tool and the workflow is superb. I just wish they would now focus on performance and stability. I'm confident they will get there :)
I don't use Sketch over illustrator because illustrator render images faster.
This is fallacy. I mean, there's a lot of others things to consider over performance, instead of just multiplying objects.
Interesting video, though.
Yes like actually using an app and not running into bugs every second step of the way :)
I love Sketch but its buggyness makes it very hard to actually work with it.
Completely agree.
Sketch was buggy when it first came out, but not as buggy as illustrator is for me.
Right now what bug happens to you? I'm using Sketch 3.0.4 for no less than 10 hours a day. I never close it ever. I've been designing about 3 iPhone apps in the last 6 months and use sketch exclusively.
Only bug I saw was the annoying copy and paste where it didn't paste in the right to position. It's fixed now, but nothing that is a show stopper.
How about these three for a start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTD-ZRa7-2ohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVHuAfoUy0Mhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-kSRSYDqV4
It's hardly getting better. Feels more like it's getting worse with all the new features added.
Given that the debate between Sketch and Adobe so often comes down to subjective reasoning and performance isn't the core reason one uses one design tool over another, but it's nice to see something a bit more objective come out. I would be interested to see how other shapes do, but this seems fairly conclusive.
I'm Sketch user myself.
Your post would be taken more seriously if you did a true side-by-side between Sketch and Adobe Fireworks instead of Illustrator.
Ok Illustrator has better performance than Sketch. What was the point of this? You use them for completely different things, you are not going to replace one with the other.
I both use them for designing UI so for me a comparison is completely relevant.
Care to elaborate? The things you do in sketch you won't do in illustrator, and the things you do in illustrator you won't do in sketch. What is someone going to do differently knowing Illustrator has better performance?
For example in Illustrator I will have a giant artboard with 20+ different screens with arrows connecting them and notes spread all over the place. This is how I wireframe/design. Here is purposefully vague zoomed out version so you have an idea:
http://f.cl.ly/items/230E3Z3U2u1A1N2i1Y0N/Screen%20Shot%202014-06-24%20at%2020.10.48.png
I can do the same in Sketch but performance starts to suffer a bit after only a few screens. I wish Sketch was better in that aspect since it really is much better in all kinds of aspects related to UI design such as managing layer styles, actually rendering pretty text, dealing with effects (shadows, blurs), border radii and not frustrating me with too much pixel rounding issues.
Same deal here. After 10 screens things start go slower to me.
I don't think the comparison is pointless. Performance is very important for making a decision, although it is not the only one. I really like Sketch for UI design, i think the workflow is a lot better than AI for this purpose. I do think Sketch has some major vector issues and therefore I still use AI for designing logos or icons and other vector-only related designs.
Making what decision? My whole point is that you still use both because they do different things.
His point is that some people ( raises hand) use Illustrator for UI design and not just the sole purpose of making vector artwork.
I use sketch for design, but I also use Illustrator all the time. It's the best tool for vector graphics. The are examples of people making icons in sketch, but it's like that video of designing iOS7 in Word.
Just use indesign and you can print your webpage and make sketchy notes on it, then scan it and trace it in illustrator
Illustrator still doesn't have Inner Shadows, which continue to amaze me. Sure you can replicate the effect, but that again is a god proof of how slow Illustrator is to work with.
I would however love if Sketch started to adopt some of the performance and precision of Illustrator.
Yesterday I used Sketch for something I'd better have used Illustrator or InDesign.
I was designing my résumé in Sketch because I thought it was a single page with few and simple graphic elements and with some text. But then I had to add a QRcode... I generated one and downloded it as an SVG.
Guys, to move this thing around it was an enormous pain:
Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to make things faster without converting to bitmap?
You should try the beta. Most of the speed issues were resolved.
Don't get me wrong I think Sketch is great in some aspects but recently it just seems as Sketch is being totally emblazoned.
Glad this video proves there are still some downsides on this.
I am sure the guys from BC are reading this and are considering rewriting their engine :D
What piece me off is how little adobe actually cares about illustrator. I remember i had to wait 2 years before they made a 64 bit version of it... and nothing really cool and new since then.
Thats why everyone love sketch it's a small team, active and has big ambitions. They are the underdog !
I think there should be even more alternatives for designers... than those two
What piece me off is how little adobe actually cares about illustrator. I remember i had to wait 2 years before they made a 64 bit version of it.
I think a big part of that is supporting legacy features, documents and workflows. As apps get older it becomes harder to make changes, for technical, strategic and user-cetric reasons.
Often, the only two available paths are:
Wipe the slate clean, anger many of your best customers and get a modern, fast, flexible codebase with fewer features. This is what Apple did with Final Cut Pro X and the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Try as hard as you can to modernise and remove unneeded features, using your existing codebase. Adobe and Microsoft are best known for taking this approach.
Both approaches have their challenges and advantages. For pro apps, and if you're in near-monopoly position, option 1 can be a disaster, so I understand why Adobe typically don't go down that path, even if some users of their apps would like them to.
I think there should be even more alternatives for designers... than those two.
There will be. I think Bohemian have done a great job, and I really like Illustrator and Photoshop, but you can expect more from Adobe, and more from other teams as the needs of designers diversifies and as software design becomes even more important to the world.
Disclaimer: We're working on a design tool as well, so the challenges outlined above have been on my mind for a very long time. :)
I think the majority is on 64-bit already since... 2010? Anyone who has bought an Apple computer should have that kind of access. Prior to that, well, I don't know...
Yeah, but the difficultly is changing mountains of code that’s 32bit (often with no performance benefit). My point was that older apps are often harder to transition to new tech. Being older and bigger is a disadvantage in that situation.
Good to know. Some people told me 64-bit is not so great speed benefit as they advertise. What about multi-core?
What about multi-core?
Often that’s even harder to take advantage of than 64bit. Making the most of multiple cores can require huge structural changes, if you haven’t planned well for it. It’s worth noting that not all parts of an app will benefit... it’s usually just the heavy processing that needs to be split into different threads.
This is a core struggle w Photoshop, which is almost 25 years old and has millions of lines of code. Sometimes we feel like we're #winning with new features and workflows, but there's always trade-offs. To echo Marc's point though, this is a great moment for screen design. Small and big teams all over are building (and revising :) tools, getting on the edge of workflows and trends and pushing everything forward. From efforts at Bjango to BC to Adobe to Macaw to Pixate and so on, its just going to be an eternal feast for designers over the next few years. Let's have fun with it!
I find Sketch much more valuable when designing for native mobile applications for a variety of use cases (wireframing, user flows, cheap "interactive" prototyping, and asset creation...the Android Asset generator as well as Sketch Measure have been godsends). I've had a lot of success designing for both iOS and Android apps. However, I generally have to break things down (much more that I would if I were working in Illustrator) by specific workflows, controller views, etc... I also can't have the extremely complex notes/scratch/meta layers that I would normally have in a messy Illustrator document.
Honestly, I think that's more of a feature and not a bug. I find it much more useful having actual conversations w/ my team instead of trying to capture everything in one document by myself to later 'present'. There are better tools for facilitating conversation than outlining everything in one document.
That being said, performance is an issue and I still can't figure out how to successfully use it for web apps. For native mobile platforms, it has vastly expedited my workflow in a multitude of ways. Like many people have said, I would still use Illustrator for pure vector illustration but have generally used Sketch for my UI workflow.
reposted at top.
I would say that when it comes to picto creation, sharp vector illustrations and information architectures (with a large volume of assets), Illustrator is doing great. I just really liked manipulating art-boards along with guidelines and all the other function of AI. It's all about how you are good/efficient using it. Some of you might say there is a right tool for every tasks but I think it's a more a personal approach of how handy are we when using it, don't you think?
After using Sketch for some time when I reach some point everything becomes really slower. I mean, SLOW THE FUCK HELL. I am producing an iPhone app, no more than 10 screens and the thing goes slow as hell when I select, move objects.
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