Hi Christopher! Thanks for doing this.

As someone who has switched over to Sketch almost exclusively for design and prototyping using the Marvel plugin, I'm a big fan of the product and appreciate how much you update and improve it.

My question is how do you plan on dealing with other larger companies like Adobe and Autodesk creating similar tools now? Your market share is strong and the community seems dedicated, but their marketing power and already tapped in user base poses a threat. Project Comet specifically looks to be a clone with prototyping built in.

Thanks for answering!

Hi Chris,

What do you guys think of Adobe's Project Comet?

What's your favorite kind of pizza?

Show us a screenshot of designing Sketch in Sketch!

Hey Christopher, thanks a lot for doing this AMA and thanks for all the great work you guys are doing in Sketch.

One of the biggest problems my team and I have with Sketch is actually using sketch as a team. Product design teams really need a way to sync .sketch files in a way to support committing and merging changes.

i.e. If I'm working on Page 3 in the document making a red square, and the other designers is working at the same time on the same document in Page 5 making a green triangle, we really need a way to each commit and see eachother's changes that, after a full sync,we would both have a file with a red square on Page 3 and a green triangle on page 5. We tried every version control solution out there but there is no solution to differ changes in .sketch files - that only you guys (Sketch) can do.

This problem kind of "Kills" your pages feature, and makes us work more like PSDs where you have to save multiple, separate files for every project. At least in photoshop there are "synced smart objects" so you can sync your styles and objects across documents. In Sketch you can't even sync symbols and styles within documents.

In late 2014 I attended a meetup in Paris with the Sketch team and Pieter (CEO) said this was on the roadmap for 2015. Now that we're closing in on 2016, is there any chance this is still on your roadmap?

Thanks for your answer, and sorry if this sounds a bit like a rant, it's just a serious pain point that my team an I encounter in working with this amazing tool.

Hello Chris, thanks for doing the DN AMA. It must be an exciting challenge to work at Bohemian Coding and build a very powerful and focus, yet simple tool for other fellow designers. I think that it goes without saying that everybody here appreciates your efforts as you guys really do make designers' lives much easier and help us focus on designing great products rather than figuring out workarounds and get frustrated over tools that are not working properly or were not designed by designers for designers with focused user experience in mind.

I have a couple of questions to ask.

1) What's the most challenging problem you are currently tackling? :)

2) I am not sure if I am correct but I heard that the Bohemian Coding team is made of a distributed team that works remotely. How do you guys communicate? Have you ever experienced any issues of working remotely? If so, how did you go about solving them?

3) What are your highlights from working at Realmac Software?

4) Are you coming to London anytime soon?

I love you but PLEASE INTRODUCE THE SMALL CAPS. More than this I just want to thank you soooo much. Your product is awesome and I use it every day.

This is less of a question and more of a suggestion.

I sympathize with all of the requests in this thread, but please don't spend any time working on a version for Windows. I love the laser focus you guys have on your software and working on versions for other OS's will only fragment that and lead to a bloated and less enjoyable product.

Thanks, and keep kickin' ass!

What would it take to improve arrows?

Hi Chris. I'm a huge fan of your work.

Motion and interaction design are on the ascendency, which I believe is in service of making software more understandable & enjoyable to use.

Given that Sketch aims to be the go-to tool for interface designers, how does the Sketch team think about addressing motion & interaction as integral parts of the interface design process?

Our agency will buy your whole team beers if you can fix the selecting text bug in Sketch. The one where you double click on the text to edit it and it unselects it self. Are there any plans to fix this issue?

Hi Christopher, really awesome of you guys to do this — thank you.

I use Sketch on a daily basis and love it: it's really a fantastic program.

However, I am a designer that works a lot with typography and have found Sketch to be hugely limited on this end (it hasn't fully stopped me from using it, though). It's possible some of this limitations are not on your software's end, but I just can't find any work-arounds.

The main issues are (1) style changes within a text box within a Text Style change the whole box's style: for example, if a Style is set to bold, and I change three words to italic. (2) very little support for glyphs — there is no panel to view and select them. This is a tiny list of major issues, but there are a few more.

Do you have any plans in the near future to address these typographic limitations?

Thank you for everything — keep up the amazing work! —A

When will Sketch be able to export PNG files without alpha channel? Surely you guys need this yourself when exporting images for iTunes Connect, what do you use for that?

My recent favorite plugin for Sketch is the awesome Sketch Constraints (https://github.com/bouchenoiremarc/Sketch-Constraints). I understand you probably won't reveal a roadmap for us, but maybe you can tell us if you guys are working on something similar out of the box?

How about HSL color?

Wow, that’s a lot of questions. Thank you for every single one! Bear with me, I'm going to start answering as many as I can possibly can. See you on the other side...

I'd love to see the option to have a 'Responsive Canvas', similar to the way the canvas works in Adobe Edge Reflow (which is now being ported to the new version of Muse). Obviously the responsive canvas isn't much good unless you can define breakpoints and layout/styling changes at those breakpoints, and having the ability to 'pin' items to the edges etc., so it's quite a big change. However, more and more tools are becoming available for true responsive design, and I'd like to know what plans there are for Sketch to stay in the game in this regard?

Hi Chris,

I'd love if Sketch would get the ability to work with data sources and flexible layouts like Josh Puckett described in his article. https://medium.com/bridge-collection/modern-design-tools-using-real-data-62d499e97482

Is this something you think Sketch should implement, or should plugins handle this?

Thanks!

Hi Christopher, I would like to know if there will be a sketch available for windows in future?

A quickone: biggest mistake made in Sketch.

Big companies seem slow to adopt Sketch because there isn't a Windows version. Do you plan to support Windows some time in the future?

Are there any improvements planned for the layers panel?

I'm specifically interested in some way to move layers in and out of groups with the keyboard. Currently, without using the mouse, layers are trapped in their group. Is that behavior an intentional design decision, or an improvement that just hasn't been considered/implemented yet?

Not a massive pain point, but would be helpful. Thanks for building such an awesome tool!

1. I would like to know if you plan to expand the connection between design and development. Right now I'm able to copy CSS for Layers. Is anything pland for importing CSS? I would love to create Shared Style by adding an live URL or importing CSS directly (without an plugin ;)).

2. Thank you for making Sketch such a great App

"(I’ll save you from asking: Yes, I design Sketch using Sketch.)"

But what do you prototype in?

Hey Chris,

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is maintaining focus on the products I'm working on. The reason I switched from Photoshop to Sketch after all was because it's so much more focused.

You must get tons of feature requests at Bohemian, how do you maintain focus and judge what is within the remit of what you want to make? Does the team have a definition for what Sketch is, and if so, is it challenging to remain within that definition?

Hey Chris! Thanks for taking the time to answer all these questions!

My question is - is there a roadmap to import color palettes in a way similar to Adobe's products? I love Sketch for almost everything I do, but I really really wish there was an easier way to load color palettes than having to write them to use system wide.

Thank you for this AMA. I love Sketch and recommend it often. However, documentation is lacking. How can you create "icons" (like clones) but then cherry pick elements so that if I change these elements, they do not affect the other icons.

For example, I want to create an icon out of a form I created. I duplicate it. I want all the icons to change if I change one but not the hint texts (as these are specific to each form).

I know this is a boring question but this is making me very unproductive.

Hi Christopher. What are your thoughts on Project Comet? Thanks!

Hi Chris,

I am quite new in sketch. I switched from illustrator and I must admit I was a bit hesitant. But now I love it :) . For webdesign this is the tool to use.

I would like to ask you how you deal with padding and margin on text or any component (shape, image,..)? Is there efficient way to do this?

At the moment I am just manually using shapes to measure the spacing, but it would be nice to add the padding/margin value to the textbox or any element generally.

Thank you Jana

Hi Chris, thanks for doing this.

Is there any plans to improve the plugins API? Things that I would really like:

• Events
• Add e.g. panels in the interface itself
• A simple storage API
• Node.js backend? :-)

59 upvotes, 42 comments and Mr Downer won't even be here till 4pm! LOVE the AMA's on DN.

Are you going to be integrating Principle with Sketch to create the 1 Ultimate tool? Cos that would be pretty awesome :)

Where is Sketch going?

Checking the beta releases over the last 6months, what I've seen is that single big features seem to have given way to multiple smaller ones. What are some of the killer ideas you guys are cooking up? How is Sketch going to evolve?

First of all, thank you to be available to answer the question of the community.

One of the biggest problems I have to design using Sketch today is to use the file as a deliverable in my projects. Since Sketch is just for Mac OS X, it's hard to find a developer partner that will have/use Macs.

How did you see that in the future? Will developers switch to OS X to accept designs using Sketch (if the share of Sketch deliveries surpass the Photoshop) or the design companies will have to deliver a full HTML + CSS production code to solve this problem?

What is the size of the team and then divisions that work on Sketch, and how does that compare to the equivalents at Realmac?

Any tips for getting the most out of Symbols?

Hi Chris,

Thanks for doing this! Huge fan of sketch, so much so I was a huge supporter on getting it implemented into my work. Now its our main UI/UX platform for design.

How did you begin to design a program that is being used by some of the best designers in the world? Being grown into programs like Adobe we get used to specific tools and functionalities! How did you advance some of these uses as well as embrace some of them?

Hi Chris, how are you doing?

I'm working in Vodafone and I'm trying to bring sketch over to the design team around here, my question is regarding user flows in sketch, do you guys plan to create something like "group artboards"? Or create an artboard for artboards. Sorry if this sounds confused, it will be really helpful since we need to make presentations for stakeholders and for some sessions we need to print the flows, at this stage I'm creating an A3 artboard and dragging and dropping the screens from another file.

Thanks for the great job you guys are doing with sketch!

ps* the screenshot designing sketch using sketch was awesome!

Hi Christopher! I used to design using Adobe (PS, AI, ID) a lot before I knew Sketch. Now, Sketch is my primary design tools since I found Sketch is more helpful. I have to share a Sketch file with my partners in the office, the problem is sometimes I design with custom fonts and I forget to copy the fonts, so we don't see the same design. (am I the only one who deal with this problem?) I want to know, is there any way I can do in Sketch to include fonts and image files when saving a Sketch file? As like "Package..." in Adobe InDesign or "Include Linked Files" in Illustrator. Thanks Chris! :)

Might be a bit late but:

I really like Sketch. Have been using it for the last couple years, and I don't want you all to stop making great things.

I guess my question is: To the extent that you can answer - what does the future of Bohemian Coding look like? Strong? Focused on Sketch? Exceeding adoption expectations?

Have you considered more stable, long-term revenue models, or do you find that the semi-annual big purchase at this price point works well for the company?

Sketch is my main design tool and I've been using it for almost two years. I really love it.

1- Do you guys plan to fix the weird padding around non-outlined text? Here is an example of what i mean. https://cloudup.com/cl3ULeeKNam

2- I used to use the Mirror tool and honestly it never worked properly under my work wi-fi. IP is an ok idea, since IP will change every time you link the phone. Do you guys plan to support USB?

3- I currently use Skala View through USB as my main tool to view Sketch files on my phone. And it works great. Have you guys thought of using their solution instead of maintaining Sketch Mirror?

Keep the good work.

Our team here just recently used Sketch to complete a full responsive redesign of Ford.com for a new global look & feel. I love the tool and pushed for it's use on this project. This created a few angry people within our IT department having to individually manage licenses.

For the love of god, PLEASE offer an Enterprise purchasing solution!!! I fear that once Adobe comes out with their equivalent software, IT will prefer it's use over Sketch for the simple fact that it's easier to maintain licensing for large teams.

How does one become part of Team Bohemian Coding? ^{_^}

Hello! I am moving from Illustrator to Sketch.

Firstly why do you make your learning course through treehouse? It cost everyone a lot of money. I would prefer if you had the learning tutorial for free.

2) it is so difficult to create a table in sketch. any tips?

Hey Christopher!

Thanks for responding to all the questions earnestly and congratulations to the entire team for building an excellent product.

Having read all the questions and your responses I am curious about a few things and maybe these are bigger questions than can be answered on this forum but here goes:

Given the success of Sketch, especially in the face of so many competitors, what do you think are the reasons behind its popularity?

Being a designer I am biased to think that its because of the enhanced user experience and superior speed of getting things done, which leads me to the next question:

Aside from utilizing the user centered design process (I am guessing), were there any design principles that helped your team stay focused and guided you to make the inevitable trade-offs?

and finally

Could you share a few lessons learned while designing a design tool?

Love the product, especially the Mirror feature. I mentioned below that Sketch was originally build for iOS/Mac in mind, however with the rise in Android users, viewing designs on an Android device has been more and more critical. Will there be a feature similar to Mirror for Android phone? And is your company looking into building prototyping features on Sketch (ie, Flinto/Pixate)?

Any plans to be able to import full style sheets and export as well ?

Thanks for your time Chris :) I have a question for you ?

You have some coding skills ? Now there is the idea of the UI and UX designers need to know programming like know how to do the frontend part or maybe draw the UI in Android Studio with XML or put all the assets in the storyboards of X-Code... This happens a lot in small and mid size startups. What is your point of view of this ?

Greetings Christopher, thanks for taking time to talk with the Sketch community. I've been using it off and on for about a year, and our UX team has just jumped on board.

First, let me say that building software is hard, hard work. You guys have a built an amazing tool that has made a dent in the universe. So thank you!

One main area I've been scratching my head about is the way object & text styles and symbols are managed. In many other apps (such as Adobe's and Apple's apps like Keynote/Pages), when you change an instance of something that's styled, it doesn't automatically update all the other items with that style; there's a "redefine/update style" step that the user initiates before cascading those style changes outward.

Our team has been quite frustrated by this behavior - resizing something by a tiny bit will cause cascading changes, and this is contrary to the way styles are handled in most other design apps. The symbols concept suffers here too, coming (in name at least) from Flash/Illustrator, but behaving differently than expected.

My question (not just to vent! =) is about the rationale around how styles should work. Is it by design, or is it the result of limitations (like time, or Obj-C or a framework)? Are we alone in this point of view? Do you have something better planned?

Thanks again for the time, and best wishes for the future of BC. We're rooting for Sketch!

Christopher, I recently updated to El Capitan on my mac and Sketch seems to run slower now, especially when editing text. Are you aware of any compatibility issues between El Capitan and Sketch?

Q: I am really itching to know why you guys decided to sort artboards in chronological order in the layer palette?

(Thanks for everything you do!)

Thank you for the AMA. I have used Sketch for the past year but I still have not figured out how to create a color palette that if I change, all elements with that color palette change (like mixin in SASS).

An answer would be very much appreciated as it would make me really productive.

Hi Chris! I'm using Sketch full-time on a recent project, and it's been a pleasure to use for UX/UI design.

Question: in the 3.4 beta, sharing artboards with "browser preview" gives me a sense of the possibility of prototyping within Sketch. Which would be amazing. Any plans for this? That you can share publicly? :)

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Not a question, but a comment. Thank you all at Sketch for making an awesome tool that makes my job easier and enjoyable. I can't wait to see what Sketch 4 brings to the table.

Also: cough Layer comps cough

Hello Sketch

I'd like to ask if there is any preview tool windows user (Android devs) can have access to use some tools to export assets & stuff. So we can deliver in a easy way without using mac on both hands to work?. Regards Mike

Hi,

I wanted to know whats the best way to convert graphics created as .PSD files and then vectorize to use in sketch ? Thanks

Thans

I recently worked with converting a very large corporate team to use sketch. I also use it everyday in my own workflows.

Any plans to make it easier to work on files as teams.?

Hey Christopher, thanks for having the time!

• What are your thoughts about Skala from Bjango?

• How often do you read books? What about writing?

• Does your design team uses Adobe CC?

• Do you know how many Brazilian users Sketch has?

What do you do if you run into a problem that you (at the moment) can't solve?

What is the most important skills for a designer, irrespective of the tools?

What's your take on font management? Fontcase was such a beautiful tool, I really miss it.

Hi Chris,

Sketch - single most amazing thing that has happened to me as a Product Designer. So thanks to you and your brilliant team for that.

But, really, Sketch Mirror is pretty bad. Needs some fixing?

Why is Sketch so awesome? What I mean is, how'd you guys manage to get the attention of almost the ENTIRE design community?! Dayyym! (No, seriously, how'd you guys do it? What were the initial responses to Sketch vs. Photoshop?)

Hi, Christopher! Dinosaur bundle of questions below: Do you participate in planning or conducting user research? How? In which stages? Have you helped creating surveys, interview protocols, AB testing for Sketch? How do you plan these activities? What tools do you use for research? Thanks!

Even as a designer, do you also know or use ObjectiveC / Swift to contribute to the development of the Mac apps you've helped design?

Hi Chris, thanks for doing this AMA. I love Sketch and everything you guys at Bohemian do. I have 3 questions but only answer what you feel comfortable ;)

• Are there any habits, rules, or processes that make your work more efficient and enjoyable?
• What are you reading right now or what book do you recommend to any fellow designer?
• For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

Thank you. Keep rocking!

Christopher, thanks for being willing to do this AMA. Also thanks for building such an amazing tool for designers.

What is your vision for the next iteration of Sketch?

• What, particularly, did you work on a RealMac, and why did you leave?
• Why did Ember die (the ole' web app (I *loved* ember (so much (!))))?