Hey man! Welcome to DN.

Designers should absolutely use the tools that are right for them. If Photoshop does it for you, by all means, use Photoshop. This was written out of a desire to articulate more clearly how this suite of powerful and capable tools were failing to meet my needs as one of Adobe's target users. It's one thing to say "this doesn't work" and another to try to figure out why—going beyond "fix it" to specific suggestions. Furthermore, exploring how one set of products was failing me gave me insights on how to better critique the products I'm building. Hopefully, it can do the same for others.

Hey Charles! Thanks for chiming in. I loved your article on the anthropological work you did for the Photoshop team, and in many ways it inspired me to write this article. Frankly, I think that work has helped lead to some of the strongest steps Adobe has taken to get back on track for design-for-screens, but I have some concerns it's still being held back by corporate cautiousness. Namely, you've identified a need for a tool like Design Space, yet have retreated to bundling it inside another application instead of letting it stand on its own. This approach asks me to open a heavy tool for your answer to a light tool I already have, and worse, it's a way of hedging your bets that communicates a lack of confidence in the product.

People have told me "you don't have to use it if you don't like it", and that's exactly the point. There are other viable options on the market that don't carry the same disadvantages Adobe products currently do. I also believe that Adobe has an incredibly talented team, yet as a large company it has inherent difficulty hearing from its users. I'm a huge believer in tools, and get especially enthusiastic about the greater social impact good tools can have when they are used by many, as Adobe products are. I do wish you the best of luck in this, and I wouldn't have written this article, otherwise.

Go on?

But it's not a healthy discussion. It's repetitive and reductive. Sketch is awesome, adobe is terrible. Boooooo adobe. There's no discussion, just an endless stream of articles, all saying the same thing. It's not showing balance in any way shape or form. It's teaching designers that the only way to work and be one of the 'cool kids' is to use sketch. Yeah, it's a great product. Bit buggy here and there but definitely solid. as is Photoshop. Methods have zero relevancy to the tools you use. They are just that, tools. You can apply whatever methodology you want using any of the products out there.

I'm just bored of the constant stream of articles that say the exact same thing, and sneery snobbery of people who are bigging up whichever product they find the best (this is usually sketch users to be fair). Do work to the best of your ability and find the tool that facilitates that process the best.

It is! Like Flash, it's a good animation tool, but it's not a good prototyping tool, and Adobe has yet to release a compelling option yet.

I think this is an important thing people aren't always thinking about when they evaluate and promote design tools. I've recently ditched Mac and gone back to Windows and Sketch is one tool I'll definitely miss as it filled that gap Fireworks sadly left (Adobe, as you're listening .... WHYYYYYYYYY!!!???!!!!).

Multi discipline teams who don't all have the same setup will at least benefit from Adobe being available on whatever they're running rather than being sent a useless .sketch file or something.

Affinity Photo has been pretty solid so far.