The hard part about having an app obsession is that sometimes you find yourself rationalizing purchasing one that maybe, maybe you just don’t really need. The new hotness in Mac design apps that came out recently is Sketch 3 by Bohemian Coding. It’s a graphics program akin to Adobe Fireworks built with designing for web and mobile in mind. A frustration among designers is working with a bloated Photoshop for creation. Sketch came out as a option specifically created to streamline the workflow for production ready designs and graphics. Sketch’s features such as Symbols and Shared Styles, multiple artboards, and export features are all fantastic.

But…

I’m not a UX designer. I haven’t designed a website in quite some time. I also have yet to work on a mobile app (although that high up list of things I’d love to do). And the programs that I do have and use already — Photoshop, Illustrator, Pixelmator, ArtRage — do what I gotta do just fine. But. It’s hard when friends are raving about it and its the last day that it’s on sale and you have a compulsion to always use the best tool out there. So yeah, I picked it up.

Sketch 3 interface

After installing it there was a moment of giddiness. A new toy to play with. That was followed with…well, what now? I figured I’d jump in and learn my way around by working on something simple. I’ve been using the OmniFocus 2 beta and decided to create some of my own icons to add a little bit of colour to it. Down below is what they look like in context.

Newly minted OmniFocus Perspective icons in place

So I’m happy with my purchase. I know I didn’t absolutely need to have it, but I’ll give it some time and defer to it as my go to design app for now. If you keep an eye out on Dribbble you might find a few new images of mine popping up on there.