Our design team recently switched from Photoshop to Adobe XD and the end result has been mostly positive. The inline commenting and basic built-in dev tools (css output, font/pixel sizings, etc.) have made handing off mockups to engineering much smoother overall.

It does seem like Sketch & Figma are the more popular tools of the moment though, so working with outside vendors means we're also using both tools here and there.

If interactivity is a must, then you can choose between Framer (if you’re a designer who codes), or ProtoPie (if you don’t know how to code). Both of them are advanced and I found them to be more capable than Principle.

I typically use design tools to make header graphics for blog posts, emails, and social media posts, and to work on mocking up website design ideas. For that, Sketch has been a reliable, easy-to-use tool that I’ve used for years. I typically will download icons from Noun Project, open them in Sketch, tweak colors, add a background, and export—and the entire process takes minutes, longer if I need to try to make an icon or tweak something, but still simple. Perfect for that type of solo work. And Sketch’s pricing works well there, too: You pay $99 for a year of updates, then can keep that final version as long as you want, and for my needs skipping updates for a couple years before re-subscribing worked great.

More recently, though, we’ve used Figma in our team to share our site styleguide, page design ideas, and mockups. The tools are similar; I’m not quite as fast as using Figma, but that’s perhaps just because I’ve used Sketch longer. Where Figma excels though is in collaboration. You can share a design link with anyone, add comments, and collaborate live like a Google Doc. And it’s built around web design, turning designs into CSS code automatically. So for collaborative mockups and web design, Figma’s the tool I now turn to—even if I do keep Sketch around still for the quicker SVG-to-finished-graphic design work.