I’ve started using Sketch. I don’t hate it.

I’m a UX Designer. To be more specific, I’m a UX Architect and Analyst, formerly from the visual design camp. But now I work conceptually, not in the more “detailed design” world of UI. UX is not UI, but that’s a story for another day.

As an architect, I create wireframes, not design mockups. And the tools I have traditionally used to do that are OmniGraffle and Axure. But I’ve decided to show an additional level of camaraderie for my UI design colleagues by adding one of their popular tools to my stable: Sketch.

If you were to think of Sketch as a human resource, someone you would hire to do a job, Sketch would be a generalist. Lightweight, versatile, but not very sophisticated, and not very efficient. It’s designed to do one thing; draw pretty pictures using vectors. And one of the types of pictures you can draw are HTML interface components. Just as you could on say, a sketch pad. By contrast, many of the objects in Omnigraffle behave like HTML objects, and of course in Axure you’re building in HTML objects, (with of course, the added dimension of interaction). These are the specialists.

It’s never a bad thing to learn a new tool, and it feels good to finally unravel the mystery of this application and the popularity surrounding it. Having had a love/hate relationship with Adobe Illustrator, I can see why Sketch has gained traction. Illustrator wouldn’t be my first choice to build wireframes either.

But the thing that’s made all this practical for me is not having to start from ground zero. Thanks to our amazing standards team, I’ve had a visual design language— a VDL—to work from. I’ve not yet taken the dive into Sketch’s symbols feature, so I’ve been working from an old-school tear sheet…not such a bad thing. I’m missing the master layers of Omni, hopefully symbols will help me get over that.

There are definitely things I like about Sketch, and I’m having fun learning how to use a new tool that’s still in its infancy…yes, Sketch is still very immature and not altogether stable. Given its following, it seems to me that it should be further along by now…but perhaps that’s part of it’s charm. And, this is the age of disruption, a period in time in which the least likely candidate often wins out.

Will Sketch replace my other tools? Not likely. But I’m glad to have it in my toolbox nonetheless.