Is Sketch a suitable replacement for Illustrator? I've been trying to find the right application to replace Illustrator for my very-infrequent needs which can't justify Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription pricing.
I use Sketch almost exclusively for iOS UI design now. It has its weak points (most specifically relating to undo), but I find it much easier to create pixel-aligned icons than anything else.
We use Sketch + iDraw. Both are not Illustrator, but they deal well with the vector stuff we need. (I'm a dev, not designer, so don't really know exactly what's going on, but we migrated from PS + FW to these tools over a couple of years).
I also use this setup. Sometimes Sketch can be a little fiddly to get SVG export working properly, so iDraw fills that niche nicely for me.
I'm glad to finally see Layer Styles in Pixelmator, for years this feature has been preventing it from being comparable to Photoshop in the eyes of many. The forum was full of people requesting it, the argument was they wanted to "get it right" rather than rushing, which is valid, but it's not really any different from Sketch or Photoshop, so I'm not sure that was really the truth (maybe a Pixelmator dev could shine some light on that?), that said - it's here now so no complaints :-) excellent work chaps & chapettes!
Sketch is good, particularly for smaller intricate work, but runs out of steam under stress. The focus is tighter - Illustrator does much more - and for some categories of work it's a delight to use.
I'm definitely not using the advanced Illustrator features. The one limiting factor I've found with Sketch is importing existing .AI files. Seems like I'm unable to ungroup the various elements of a file to work with.
I'm a pretty heavy Photoshop user, so I'll probably take advantage of their photography offer for $10/month which is easily justifiable:
The latest version of Sketch pretty reliably accepts clipboard input from Illustrator. It's not as nice as being able to import .ai files directly, but at least it's a hint of where they might be heading.
