“The plot has suddenly thickened,” he posted on LinkedIn earlier this week. The new firm is headed by CEO LeeAnn Manon and chief product officer Chris Cheung: both Autodesk veterans, although neither was working for the company at the time of the spin-off.Ĭheung was previously part of the SketchBook Pro product team at Autodesk, before going on to head up work on Mischief, Foundry’s now-discontinued digital sketching software. “After careful consideration and evaluation, we found the perfect home for SketchBook with a company formed by people who previously built and evangelized the SketchBook brand.”

“While we value SketchBook and feel an obligation to the community … we also recognize that much has changed at Autodesk,” wrote Autodesk VP for automotive, concept design and XR Thomas Heermann.

This week, Autodesk broke that radio silence to announce that development of Sketchbook has been taken over by a new independent company, Sketchbook Inc. Now developed by the people ‘who built and evangelized’ the brand The app’s social media accounts also went silent, with tweets from Sketchbook pausing in December 2020.

The spin-off marks the latest change of ownership (and name: it has now lost the capital ‘B’) for Sketchbook, which was orignally developed by Alias and acquired by Autodesk along with Maya in the 2000s.Īt Autodesk, it went through a number of further changes in format and pricing, eventually ending up in 2018 as a free app for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, with a separate commercial Enterprise edition.Īfter that, things seemed to stagnate: the last update to the desktop version was in 2019, which was to remove the need to log in to use it, although the mobile editions were updated more recently. The apps will continue to be available from the Apple, Google and Microsoft app stores, where they can currently be downloaded for free, but delivered by their new owners.Īnother change of owner for the veteran digital sketching software Scroll down for news of the price changes.Īutodesk has spun off SketchBook, its digital sketching software, to a new company, Sketchbook Inc.

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