A shortlist of Sketch plugins which I use to make life just that little bit simpler...
| Sketch plugin | Best for | Why I love it |
|---|---|---|
| Abstract | Version Control | Having used the Folio app for some time, I was keen to see what Abstract would bring to the table. Version control for designs is something that has long been awaited. This is a must-have addition to your workflow to allow you to keep tabs on your changes, and stay in sync with your team. |
| AnimaApp Auto Layout | Layout | Though there is much more to their fully-fledged LaunchPad app, the main thing I use this plugin for is to manage layout of elements. Similar to the way in which CSS Flexbox would work, you can utilise column or row direction with standardised margins between elements. On top of this you can also do more complex things with positioning, but I have found this to get a bit unweildy when you get too creative. Another nice little feature is the "Arrange artboards in grid" feature which helps to keep all your artboards nicely spaced and positioned. |
| Artboard Manager | Productivity | I used to spend so much time rearranging artboards after resizing or re-ordering. It was painful. Now, with this little gem of a plugin, you simple drag your artboard to make it larger and everything around it will move accordingly. If you drag and drop an artboard again it will rearrange everything so you never have artboards overlapping each other. It only does this one thing—but does it very well! |
| Base64 Encoder | Asset Production | Again, this is a very simple app that does one thing, and does it well! With this little guy, you can simply export your selected layers as a Base64 encoded image for use in CSS or HTML files. Used along with Sketch Runner, it's a breeze to an otherwise complex round trip of export and re-formatting. Nice! |
| Color Contrast Analyser | Accessibility | Not the sexiest plugin, but an important one nonetheless. It's all to easy to forget about the myriad of people out there with poorer eyesight, or 💩 monitors with low contrast. This lightweight plugin allows you to quickly check if your text is legible to WCAG standards. |
| Craft from InVision | Lots of things, see below | After rolling out various sub-plugins for the craft tool, this little guy has become a foundational part of todays workflow. See each Craft feature below... |
| Sync (CRAFT) | Collaboration | This allows you to send your artboards to an InVision project directly from Sketch. Need to create a new InVision project? That too can be done directly from Sketch. No more bouncing back and forth between Sketch and the browser. |
| Library (CRAFT) | Styleguides | This used to be a bit buggy, so was not something I have used all that much, but as I build out our design library in TravelPerk this is something that could be come useful when sharing assets between designers. Will see how the latest version stacks up now. |
| Data & Duplicate (CRAFT) | Content generation | This plugin is not something I use all that much. For using data within my designs, I tend to reach for the Sketch Data Populator plugin (see below), and when it comes to the duplicate part, I feel this feature is miles behind if you compare it to the Adobe XD equivalent, Repeat Grid. Maybe one day this feature will catch up with the standard of the other Craft offerings. |
| Freehand (CRAFT) | Collaboration | Freehand is not something I have used all that much, but can imagine this been very useful for dispersed teams, or to quickly share progress in a meeting, as it allows you to easily share your entire canvas and walk people through in realtime, offering ways to add annotations and ideas, right in context of that meeting. You can then take this feedback straight into your design. |
| Stock (CRAFT) | Content creation | Stock was a nice little surprise that I hadn't really been waiting for, but when it arrived it saved me bags of time on a Facebook campaign that I was creating. Again, this tool offers you the ability to do a lot of heavy-lifting directly inside of Sketch. You can search and select images, immediately seing these in context and when you are ready, you can just go ahead and buy them. Great for people who work with a lot of photography or stock in their designs. |
| Prototype (CRAFT) | Prototyping | Prototype on the other hand was something I was holding out for. Having seen the great approach that XD was taking for merging design and prototyping, I was awaiting the day Sketch would have a similar offering, and here it is. Not only can you link between screens, but you can also scroll to a part of your artboard, link to external files, and also open up artboards as overlays (though as of the time of writing, you are limited basic positioning). Again, what this tool offers is a great way to stay inside of Sketch and stay focused on the work, instead of breaking focus and venturing off to the browser to stitch up your prototype. |
| Dynamic Button | Buttons | This is a simple one. Simply define the padding around a text object in the form of 8:16:8:16 and hit Command + J and just watch as the button background magically resizes. It's almost the way that HTML and CSS work, just with that extra shortcut in the way. Still, a huge timesaver for those who work with lots of buttons. |
| Find and Replace | Text | This can be a real time-saver when you are sharing your prototype with different clients or customers for usability testing. In a moment, you are able to swap out user names, locations or any other textual data, to make it more relevant to the person you are about to share your designs with. Again, this falls under the huge time-saver category. |
| LingoApp | Asset Management | Having looked into Lingo a while back, I am happy to see that they now offer a Sketch plugin (beta version at the moment). What I really like about this is that it is now super simple to share assets and styles with your wider organisation. You basically work within Sketch, sync the assets you want to share, and now someone can view and download these straight from the Lingo web app, or via the Mac App. I will probably follow up on this one in more depth one day... |
| Magic Presenter | Presentations | Presentations are sometimes a necessary evil, and while PowerPoint, Slides and Keynote are getting better with time, they are still not what we would consider "Design Tools". Magic presenter allows you to design and build your presentation using the tool which you are most comfortable with, and then, when you are ready, just hit the shortcut and you have yourself a presentation, generated directly from your Sketch file. |
| Paddy | Layout | Paddy is awesome and is the closest thing you will get to web-based flex layouts within Sketch. I have started using this over Anima App's Auto Layout as this seems to be more reliable and offers more features. Check it out! |
| Rename It | Productivity | This nifty plugin, as you would expect, allows you to easily rename your artboard and files and it supports some basic things like sequencing and pre or post-fixing. Great for when you are trying to organise that symbols page with hundreds of artboards. |
| Sketch Data Populator | Designing with Data | A subject which I am very passionate about (read more on Medium) is designing with Data. This little plugin allows you to pull in data from an external JSON file and plug it straight into your design. This can be very useful when trying to simulate all those edge cases that we often forget about. It's also a nice way of breaking down your text layers to correspond to the "keys" which will populate them. So rather than having 10 buttons with slightly different copy, you start getting into the mindset of thinking about { button.save } and such. |
| Sketch Runner | Productivity | Similar to Mac's Spotlight feature, or Alfred App, Sketch Runner brings text commands right to your finger tips. Anyone who is used to working in an IDE and running commands will feel right at home here. No more finding that mouse, and hovering around. Just hit the shortcut key and type what you need. This little beauty will save you bags of time — I guarantee. |
| SVGo | SVG optimisation | This little guy just sits in the background and makes sure that those SVGs you export are in a nice, lighweight format. If you haven't already, you should start understanding how SVGs are constructed and how you can use these in your web projects as the support continues to grow. |
| Symbol Organizer | Organisation | We've all at some point, clicked on that "Symbols" page in Sketch and said "Oh, crap" before trying to put all our icons together, all our buttons over here, and all our widgets over there. This was overly time consuming and frankly not worth the effort. Now, so long as you name your symbols properly (you are using / for organising aren't you) you can just run the command and all of your symbols will magically order themselves based on the paramters you set. For example, you can decide which level to breakdown the grouping of symbols, set margins, add titles etc. I now use this plugin every day for keeping on top of that ever-growing library of symbols. |