Why Repsketch?
Product designers (here I mean, physical products like apparel, shoes, and jewelry...) rarely interact with one another and share little resources, especially when it comes to outside their organization, causing everyone to start from ground zero every time. This also creates a huge barrier to entry for new designers and innovators who have top-quality ideas but lack the know-how and find it extremely hard to create vector sketches due to lack of knowledge, experience, resources and ideas.
In contrast, we are inspired by the software and IT industry embracing resource sharing, saving them billions in hours of work, snowballing creativity, opening opportunities, and shaping the future of technologies.
So we decided to challenge this paradigm for product designers by taking the first-step and opening our libraries by sharing our designs and vector sketches for anyone to repurpose them and rather than reinventing, build on top of the excellence.
Hmmm, Now I’m curious...What happened next?
Once we made the decision to openly share our vector sketches, we searched our computer and cloud drives, digging our old, clunky hard-disks and we found staggering 2K+ vector sketches, literally rotting in our storage for years. This pile brought beautiful memories but soon turned into guilt and shame for hoarding all this knowledge that could have been used in supporting designers and entrepreneurs creating purposeful products for this world.
Determined to cleaning up our act, we moved forward but soon hit our first roadblock. We noticed that most of these vector sketches were stored in proprietary software format such as .ai (adobe illustrator format) and will not work in any other vector editor making it closed, expensive, and non-inclusive. In order to make these vector files accessible for everyone, they had to be converted into a vector format that’s flexible, compatible and is an open-standard. We finally landed on SVG format as it checked all our requirements and has a strong adoption (more on SVG here).
Although adopting SVG was an easy decision, soon we found that the major problem with it was that we couldn’t find a single vector editor that could replace Adobe illustrator or could even come close that we could recommend to the designers in need. The available editors were complex, expensive and requires heavy processors. The ones that were freely available were outdated or underdeveloped.
Therefore, this clearly presented a need for a vector editor that:
- Fully supports SVG format
- Inclusive, Free to use and build for all types of product designers (not just for graphic designers)
- Doesn’t overwhelms
- is light weight and doesn’t freezes computer like Adobe Illustrator.
- Most importantly, it nurtures sharing knowledge, not hoarding it.
“The achievement of one goal should be the starting point of another” - Alexander Graham Bell
Repsketch, was born on 1st, Jan 2022.
What is Repsketch?
Short for Repurposing Sketches is a platform where you get rewarded for learning, creating, and contributing vector sketches to the community.
*We learned by speaking and working with our users on our platform, Techpacker.