Photoshop CC 2015 is copying Sketch and it’s a good thing

Yesterday Adobe updated it’s lineup to Adobe CC 2015 and added several features to all of it’s products. Besides stuff like new healing-tools and other photography-related features, there are some new abilities for designers as well. All of these features look highly familiar to designers who worked with Sketch by Bohemian Coding from time to time. What are the changes? And why is it good to copy Sketch? Here are the features and why Sketch and we explain why Sketch has nothing to worry about.

Overview

Design Mode

The design-mode is something obvious: It’s Sketch. But behold! It’s not just the looks. Math inside value-fields and pixel-independent workflow are quite invisible but is something Sketch developed over the past few years. Even handlers around objects are copied right from Sketch. The whole sidebar on the right screams “Yes, you know me already!” but sadly the interface is just bananas. Everything feels a little bit cluttered and not as clean and easy-to-use as Sketchs.

Multiple Styles

Something that makes Sketch pretty awesome was to add multiple styles, like shadows, to objects. This adds more realism to elements or provides other creative opportunities. Now fully integrated into Photoshop CC 2015 too. Sadly the styles-window is a mess now with several “drop-shadow”-layers. Some work has to be done here.

Artboards

One of my favorites. Sketch supports this since day one, now Photoshop has it’s big moment too: artboards within documents. There are new tools to add and arrange them. It looks and works great on first sight. Adobe even added the big handlers around the artboarts, like in Sketch.

Why it doesn’t matter

These are just a few things Photoshop added from Sketch. When you dig a little deeper, you will find some more stuff too. And layer-based-exporting and a iOS-mirror-tool is just a few of them. Sketch does a great job to listen to Designers around the world. A notably amount of features were added on user-request and that’s the biggest strength of Sketch: being inside the community and actually listen.

Something which Adobe is trying to do but is failing at because of (I assume) it’s size. Bohemian Coding is small and does a great job of building something which fits the needs of designers. The best thing Adobe can do: copy stuff that has proven itself to be needed and integrate it.

Why is it good?

Sketch is a great tool and way ahead of competitors. Adobe did a great job of taking what is good and integrate it. Many designers who are not able to use Sketch because of clients demands or other reasons can now enjoy these features too. Why it won’t hurt Bohemian Coding?

Adobe has still it’s problems: What tools are to be used to design Apps or responsive websites? All Adobe apps are now able to do it but just 50%. Even the tutorial-sites recommend InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop and we know all of these can do it but they are not perfect at it, not dedicated to it. But Sketch is! And it’s growing directly inside the community. Photoshop is big and massive. They built a Sketch right inside Photoshop. This shows how problematic the launch of a new tool is. It’s not as agile as Sketch. Nothing to worry about Sketch, you’re going nowhere.

Enough?

Many designers are jumping on the Sketch-train. Even Apple has published templates of it’s watch-interfaces for Sketch and companies like Sony or Etsy are working with it too. It’s 99$ and super-lightweight. There are more reasons to Sketch than just those which got copied. The App is now a proven example of how good independent software can be and it can be professional too. Go ahead Adobe, take a few more features. It won’t help. Sketch is Sketch.

What are your thoughts? Do you like Sketch or Photoshop more? Let me hear your opinion on this on Twitter!