Weighing Sketch and Photoshop

A few of us on the Etsy design team have started using Sketch instead of Adobe Photoshop for UI design. It took some getting used to, but I’ve been getting very comfortable working with Sketch’s distinctly un-Adobe-like approach to crafting interfaces, in particular the way it delivers all the advantages of working with vector graphics while producing results that are indistinguishable from raster graphics.

I’m planning on posting more of my thoughts on my transition to Sketch soon, but yesterday, when Adobe notified me of an update to Photoshop, I was reminded of another reason why I prefer Sketch so much.

On the left is the update screen for Photoshop. This particular software patch weighs in at 129 MB — just for the update. Sketch itself weighs in at less than a tenth; just 12 MB — that’s for the entirety of the app, the whole megillah; not just a software update.

You can argue that Photoshop needs to be bigger because it does so much more, but that is just the point. It does too much for my taste, and I’m a little tired of paying the freight costs of all those features I don’t need: the slowness, the crashes, the progressively exploitive pricing. I’m really enjoying Sketch’s more streamlined feature set, and how it is clearly purpose-built for designing user interfaces. Simpler tools are very often better tools.

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