Sketch Tips & Tricks 202
I recently gave a lunch & learn presentation to our creative team at Digital Surgeons. The reason being, we’ve all been using Sketch for about 2 years or so now and I realized that we all didn’t really have the same knowledge base or workflow in the program. This became abundantly clear when having to work in another designer’s sketch file and feeling completely lost.
Think of this as an intermediate-to-advanced level of tips and tricks for Sketch in a long overdue follow-up article to “5 Reasons Why I left Photoshop for Sketch.” With that said let’s get into it.
Symbols
When should you make something a symbol in Sketch? Any time you have to duplicate an element of UI such as:
- Buttons
- Navigation
- Icons/Avatars
- Simple Mastheads/Headers
When you’re first jumping into a design and finding a groove, it’s very easy to just alt+drag elements you want duplicates of as you’re trying to put together a design. I would even say it’s fine not to do this until you have your first screen in a place where you’re happy with it, but once you start forming patterns in your design it’s time to start making symbols.
It may seem a little tedious at first, but I’ve found a little extra meticulous work up front is going to save you a lot of frustration and time down the line WHEN, not if, you have to make a global change, like changing all your buttons from square edges to round ones.
Naming Symbols
When naming symbols, you can group/categorize them by using “/” in the name. The biggest thing to remember when naming a symbol is to keep your punctuation consistent. If you don’t, this will create new groups with however many symbols you named with different punctuation.
Example: icon/ui/arrow is not the same as icon/UI/arrow.
This will actually produce two different groups in your symbols list
Organizing Your Symbols
Naming and organizing go hand in hand. There’s no point in doing one if you neglect the other.
Here’s what my old symbols pages use to look like.
Now I spend the little bit of extra time naming my symbols and organizing them (with the help of a plugin) and it saves me a lot of time at the end of a project when it’s time to prep assets for development.
My symbols pages today:
Why this is important really comes down to efficiency. And a couple tasks will become a lot faster, such as:
- Quickly finding a specific symbol you need to modify.
- Exporting assets for development.
- Replacing a symbol within your document easily.
There are a ton of symbol organizer plugins for Sketch. I’ve found this one by Jason Burns to be my favorite, primarily because it gives you more control on how the symbols are laid out in terms of spacing and columns.
Layer Styles
I use layer styles for brand colors of whatever client I’m working on primarily. This makes it easy to apply colors across multiple UI elements, such as icons and buttons. If a color needs to change for whatever reason — say a lighter shade of red — I just update the layer style of that color and everywhere it’s applied across my document it’s updated.
Icons
Just about every project, in regards to a screen, is going to have icons. I like to set up my icons in a way that they’re super flexible and won’t take time away from bigger tasks where I need to focus. Here are a few tips on icons:
Make sure all your icons are on the same size artboard.
Have you ever found yourself trying to measure the distance between an icon and another UI element and Sketch tells you the distance is 35.39px away? Sketch thinks that some people want to space elements apart by fractions of a pixel, and those people are lunatics. So here’s how I set up my icons.
Now, these icons are at all different sizes, but since I’ve put them in the same size artboard, spacing between UI elements will be consistent.
Since all these icons are symbols, I can easily swap them out with symbol overrides.
Assign a style to all your icons
Sketch allows style overrides within your symbols. This is really handy for changing the color of an icon or anything really that’s assigned a style. What’s also great about this is you no longer have to have multiple symbols of the same icon in different colors anymore.
Unify your icons to 1 shape
When importing icons from illustrator (because let’s be honest, sketch is horrible for making icons), most of the time your icons will come in as multiple layers. The icon may appear fine, but it’s made up of tons of shape layers. This becomes a problem when you want to apply a style override.
Text Styles
Text styles are one of the most monotonous things to keep updated and set up in Sketch, but I can honestly say being disciplined with text styles has saved me countless hours in making global changes to typography across a project.
Start a new project with your stylesheet being the first page
This may seem a little weird at first, like putting the cart before the horse, but just identify the main typefaces you think you’re going to use and set up the typestyles. You can always go back and update them as your design evolves.
Here I’m using a Sketch Starter template by Sidecar. It’s great in terms of their naming convention and how easy it is to update text styles quickly across the board.
When it comes to color and type, I love what sidecar did here with naming the style “h1/primary/center” instead of “h1/red/center” so now if I decide I want my primary color typestyles to be blue instead of red I don’t have to go and rename 33 different typestyles.
Additionally, you can add typestyle colors with the same color hierarchy naming convention — secondary, tertiary, and so on.
So this is where I typically start a project. For this styles page I usually just identify the typefaces I’m going to be using for headlines and body copy and I don’t really worry about weights or exact size just yet, as I’m exploring the home page look and feel.
When I’ve got the home page or first couple of screens in a place where I’m happy with the type, I’ll go through selecting the text layers and clicking “update text style” on the right-hand panel in Sketch. Then I’ll take a look back at my styles page and make sure all my different color text styles match.
I’ve always found people’s workflows and niche shortcuts fascinating in Sketch. Even if you knew most of these already I hope there’s one tip, big or small, you can take away from this.
TLDR:
- Symbols — Name your symbols. Keep punctuation the same. Use “/” to organize them into groups.
- Icons — Each icon should be 1 whole shape and on the same size artboard as all your other icons. Apply layer styles to your icons.
- Layer Styles — Use layer styles for things like brand colors, buttons, and icon colors. This will make it quick and easy to make a global change, in regards to color, across the board.
- Type Styles — Make your stylesheet at the beginning of every project and identify your primary typefaces.
