“Ten years ago there wasn’t a tool that defined standards when it comes to designing user interfaces,” explains Sketch’s co-founder and Chief Design Officer, Emanuel Sá. “We wanted a way to explain to people that interface design is not an afterthought. It is part of a huge process — but it’s not a small part. It needs to be well-done and understood by everyone involved. And most importantly it needs to be useable by everyone in the team. That was the goal with Sketch.”

Back in 2010, the design landscape looked very different. Skeuomorphism was the hot trend. Sharing platforms like Dribbble and Instagram didn’t exist yet. And design software simply wasn’t as accessible as it is today.

“We wanted a way to explain to people that interface design is not an afterthought. It is part of a huge process — but it’s not a small part. That was the goal with Sketch.”

A lot has changed since then. Now, with over one million customers, Sketch has become the go-to for designers and teams around the world. So we thought we’d talk to some of the people who’ve been involved from our earliest days to find out how we got to where we are today.

The early days

“The first versions of Sketch were built highly collaboratively,“ says Pieter Omvlee, Sketch’s co-founder and CEO. ”At first it was just Emanuel and me on design and development, but the lines were always blurry; we collaborated heavily and never had one side dictate what the other should do. As we’ve grown the team I think we’ve managed to keep that spirit. People with different expertise should work together and contribute so that we get to the best result.”

As people began to pick up on this approach and started using the Mac app, a community began to form. And this is where the success of Sketch really started. “Don’t ask me how that happened, I have no clue,” laughs Emanuel. “People just really loved it. I think the price, the technology, the freedom — it allowed a lot more people to look at design as real career. The right tool was available on the right platform. And we were so lucky to have a lot of people who kept pumping in resources; icon sets, interface sets, plugins and more.”

Forming a Community

“The community has played a monumental role in shaping the design space and the tools we all work with,” says Galya Iliev, who started her Sketch journey in that community, before joining the company in 2015. She’s now our Head of Partnership Marketing and Commercial Opportunities, working closely with the community every day. “Designers loved the native feel of an app made specifically for UI and UX design.” As creatives began to use it in their day-to-day work, they shared their designs and thoughts on social media. Tutorials appeared on YouTube and designers started meeting up to talk about Sketch in more detail. It was incredible to watch, and the team were blown away by the support.

“We were so lucky to have a lot of people who kept pumping in resources; icon sets, interface sets, plugins and more.”

“I remember some of the first Sketch meetups in San Francisco, Paris, Mexico City, and Beijing — to name a few!” says Galya. “Our team members began to travel and attend events and had some amazing conversations with community members that sparked internal chats and, in some cases, great new feature releases.”

These conversations gave the team valuable feedback that they could use to make the app better for everyone. And when it didn’t make complete sense for them to dedicate time to developing a feature, the community stepped up — developing amazing extensions and integrations to cater to those specific needs. “When creating a tool like Sketch, you can easily get distracted with an infinite amount of potential features to add,” explains Ale Muñoz, our Developer Relations Manager (and a long-time plugin developer himself). ”To keep a laser-focus, it’s essential to say ‘no’ to many of those ideas. Extensions can cover the proverbial last mile of design workflows, while we concentrate on making Sketch a great tool for everyone.”

“The community has played a monumental role in shaping the design space and the tools we all work with. Designers loved the native feel of an app made specifically for UI and UX design.”

While Ale is right, tracking feedback and suggestions from the people that use our Mac app every day is still an essential part of our workflow — and it helps us make Sketch better. “Customer feedback is a core part of how we think and evolve our product,” says Diana Ribeiro, our Customer Success Manager. “It sits at the center of everything we do and ripples across every department at Sketch. I feel really fortunate to have such a passionate and vocal user base, and it’s very important to us that our customers feel heard.”

“I think our success stems from knowing when to add features people are asking for, when to add features they’ve never thought of, and when to to refuse to add features that don’t make sense,” adds Pieter.

Developing an ecosystem

As Ale explains, though, that decision isn’t always easy. Sometimes, feature requests are sometimes a signal that we should be doing something better. “That creates a new set of challenges for us. We want to offer our customers the best tools, but we never want to alienate the developer community by ‘Sherlocking’ successful plugins,” he says. “We try not to base our work on existing implementations, but sometimes it’s inevitable to come up with similar solutions. There are only so many ways to do some things.”

Ultimately, though, it comes down to making sure everyone has exactly what they need to create their best work in Sketch — whether we build it or it comes from our amazing plugin community. “One of my most common answers when people ask me ‘does Sketch do this thing?’ is ‘no, but there’s a plugin for that’,” Ale smiles.

One reason for this wealth of plugins is the early decision to make Sketch‘s file format open. The team has always believed that your files are your own, and you should be able to do whatever you want with them — whether that’s writing dev tools, or using them in another app. That decision has given our fantastic community of designers and developers scope to help shape the platform — with their knowledge, as well as their extensions.

“Sketch’s plugin architecture offered literally unlimited possibilities for developers,” Ale continues. “Back then, there wasn’t a lot of information available for plugin developers. So a very passionate, closely knit group of hackers gathered around small pools of knowledge like the Sketch-plugins mailing list. I remember being amazed by the work other plugin devs shared there.”

“Back then, there wasn’t a lot of information available for plugin developers. So a very passionate, closely knit group of hackers gathered around small pools of knowledge like the Sketch-plugins mailing list.”

“The knowledge sharing has been so humbling to watch,” says Galya. “Designers from every walk of life — from individual designers to bigger product teams at Google, Facebook, Apple, and IBM — all created resources and integrations with Sketch. And when there‘s that kind of great synergy, there’s also a lot of collaboration.”

From our perspective, it’s incredibly uplifting to see close-knit communities form around the world with a passion for great design at their core. It’s been incredible to see how our app has helped forge relationships and friendships around the globe.

It all comes down to you

And so, in 2019, almost by accident, Sketch passed one million customers. “It passed by without us noticing,” smiles Pieter. “It was only looking back that we realized. It’s really not a milestone we were striving for or working towards. The goal has always been to build a better product and hope, or trust, that the rest would take care of itself.”

But of course there are big benefits to having such a large, active and experienced community. “Over the years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how we relate and interact with our customers,” says Diana. “Looking back, our customer base isn’t just bigger — it’s matured, too. And that’s pushed us to refine and improve.”

“It’s an amazing feeling to see people with such diverse backgrounds and in so many different places use our product to build what they’re passionate about.”

Diana‘s sentiment applies across every part of Sketch. We’ve grown along with you — whether you’re an individual designer or part of a larger team. And as we ask Emanuel to reflect on ten years of Sketch, the gratitude he feels is clear. “I feel honored and forever humble,” he says. “It’s a privilege to be able to work for this community.”

Pieter shares that feeling. “We could have never imagined it,” he says. “We built Sketch because Emanuel needed it and we figured there’d be more people like him out there. It took off in a bigger way than we could have ever dreamt.”

“It’s an amazing feeling to see people with such diverse backgrounds and in so many different places use our product to build what they’re passionate about.”

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This is our second post celebrating ten years of Sketch. Take a look at our interview with Emanuel to hear his thoughts on the last ten years in design, and keep an eye out for more stories from 2010 in the coming months.