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AMA: Christopher Downer, Designer at Sketch

almost 8 years ago from Christopher Downer, Designin’ Sketch

  • Suhaib S, almost 8 years ago

    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?

    0 points
    • Christopher Downer, almost 8 years ago

      Thanks Suhaib.

      1) Maybe people just like the underdog, but our focus is something that people admire. I think a lot of people were really excited with the idea of Sketch, and started spreading the word. After all, we are an app created by designers for designers. As I mentioned earlier, our fantastic community have played a huge factor to our popularity.

      2) I think this is a really interesting question. As I'm somewhat on the spot, my mind has gone blank, but we want to always try and do right by the user. We want to ignore trends, and focus on things that will last—we don’t want to remove things from the app later on, so we consider everything we add really carefully. For a design app, it’s almost crazy, but for us, it's usability first, visuals after, which we hope to keep completely minimal, and only show things contextually, when needed.

      3) Designing a design tool is really hard.

      0 points