Sketch 52 — First Impressions
Bohemian Coding has just dropped Sketch 52 and, because I would have been the kid who crammed the marshmallow in his mouth before the researcher even got round to telling him that he’d get more if he didn’t eat it for 10 minutes, I have bid adieu to Sketch 51 and updated immediately.
Here’s my hot take on the update, positive, neutral and negative takeaways largely from their blog post before I get my teeth really into the new version.
Positive
Data Feeds
I didn’t realise how much I wanted this until they gave it to me — and I haven’t even had a chance to play about with it properly and use my own data sets. The way it works in symbols is great too, right in the overrides section.
I’ve felt like I’ve gone out of my way to bring gender balance and diversity into my designs and I love that Sketch has baked that right in!
I genuinely like it when the functionality of a 3rd party plugin is brought into the app proper so I’m pleasantly surprised that Bohemian Coding and Unsplash have gone right in with a partnership. I’ve used Unsplasher and Unsplash It to populate shapes with images. Both are a little janky, so it’s great to see what looks like a more consistent and predictable experience. Oh, and you can populate multiple symbols with it in one click? Chef kiss
I’m sure there’s something to be said for the plugin devs who have their ideas officially stolen — see almost every native Apple app ever, from Spotlight to Siri — but I feel like this like of… feature adoption… is more on the ‘imitation is flattery’ scale of things.
Text and Layer Style overrides
A provisional positive. I admit that I don’t 100% quite get how Sketch likes to handle symbols just yet, it all seems like a little bit of an open hack. A feature in want of a dedicated interface. Flexible for sure, but not exactly GUI friendly. It’s still crazy that to change colours in an instance of a symbol you need to create colour swatches as nested symbols to override with. Why it’s not possible to just select a new override colour for any given — or perhaps specifically designated — symbol object is beyond me.
Edit: Blame the poor discoverability of the feature, but I take back what I said up there about changing the colour of a symbol instance. It’s finally clicked! Incase you’re like me and completely didn’t get what’s going on, this is how you apply a colour override.
Inline hex for codes
A simple change but pleasantly effective.
Offsetting paths
A cool feature in Illustrator, now in Sketch. Neat! Doesn’t quite work in the same way. I don’t care that Sketch won’t let me chose my joins or set my miter limit (…whatever one of those is…), but it would be nice to preview and have a limit of more than 20px. At the moment it acts more like a limited transform each. Also, bounding boxes go a bit scatty if you try to negatively offset a selection of assets below the visible limit for the smallest of them.
Resize preview
Another simple change, not actually a functionality per se, but a little clue as to what your chosen resize option does. I expect it will save just milliseconds of thought and hesitation per use, but those will add up individually and hugely across the Sketch using community to days of extra productivity.
Sticky artboard tiles and flitering
A nice minor improvement but I can’t really see myself using layer filters that much. I don’t in Photoshop and that’s been there for years.
Neutral
Dark mode
I don’t have Mojave so I don’t know how life changing this is going to be. Given what I said up top (through a mouthful of marshmallow) about not being able to wait to update stuff, it just goes to show how little the new MacOS excites me. Maybe I just have strong feelings for High Sierra that I’m not ready to admit to myself.
Edit: I have now downloaded Mojave, as you can see from my dark themed Sketch chrome above.
New icon design
Fine, ok before. I like the icon for artboards though, that’s fun.
Nesting boolean operations in combined shapes
I’m sure there are people out there who will be excited by this. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be them.
Negative
Character size
I liked being able to scroll font size, one of my favourite discoveries in Sketch coming from Adobe land. Now it’s gone just for font size but not for kerning and leading. Why?
Bend modes
I actually liked being able to see at a glance whether an item was multiplied etc., but apparently we don’t need that any more. I’m relatively new to Sketch so immediate information on blend mode might not be that important. I’ll have to trust Bohemian’s UXDs on this one.
Wishlist
I keep hitting, and will probably always will hit, V to bring up my selection cursor. It doesn’t do that, it brings up the vector pen tool. I’d like to tell Sketch that I’ve spent 10 years pressing V when I’m done with something, and I’m going to keep doing that until I die.
Talking of Adobe habits, I sometimes don’t have a trackpad to hand but am used to shift+scrolling to zoom in and out. I know I can cmd+scroll but I’m stuck in my ways. Re-learning ‘bring to front’ and ‘send to back’ was enough, dammit.
I’ve imported some custom artboards for social media image sizes. They were out of date instantly and I can’t find any way of deleting them without rolling up my sleeves and getting involved in hidden files. You let me create them Sketch, why not destroy?
Conclusion
In conclusion, 52 feels like a good update which has brought in some clever features, while sadly losing a few fun little bits that I found to be a good USP for Sketch. Somehow I am already a grouchy old man who hates change.
It seems like we’ll get some more powerful Sketch Cloud integration before 53, which will only be a good thing. Bohemian Coding is, and have been for a long time, walking a fine line between feature set and bloat. Slowly adopting gadgets from other apps and platforms, and developing their own, while pushing for greater stability through backend improvements is working so far, long may it continue. I’m already looking forward to 52.2!
