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Sketch, Figma or Adobe XD?

6 years ago from Spencer Bittle, Designer

  • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, 6 years ago

    for the most part it wouldn't affect the final work you deliver.

    If you know what to look for, it’s often easy to know the tool that created the artwork, just by looking at the results.

    Shape antialiasing is interesting. I did some tests a while ago (I should update for the latest versions, but I doubt the results would be very different):

    As you can see, Photoshop’s antialiasing isn't as good as Core Graphics (Sketch) or Affinity Designer, but it’s the third best of the lot. Illustrator’s shape antialiasing is especially bad (not many steps, mismatched dark to light and light to dark comparison).

    The tool you choose does matter, in my opinion. It absolutely affects the final work you deliver.

    3 points
    • Art BlancArt Blanc, 6 years ago

      Is pdf rendering (for iOS assets) also using Core Graphics?

      0 points
      • Marc EdwardsMarc Edwards, 6 years ago

        Yep. Pretty much all vector drawing done using Apple’s APIs is Quartz 2D or Core Graphics under the hood.

        That means SVGs and CSS in Safari, PDFs in Preview and Mail, plus vector shapes in Keynote, Sketch, PaintCode, and lots of other apps.

        PDF iOS assets are rendered by Xcode using Core Graphics, then included in the bundle as PNGs (compressed using PNGCrush). That means the vector shapes look great, as shown above. There’s lots of other potential issues, depending on what the PDFs contain. More info here: Why I don’t use PDFs for iOS assets

        2 points