Sketch 3 Tutorial — Designing Google Docs Icon
Replicating a design is not hard. But creating an original design, translating it from an ideas in your head, to pixels on the screen can be quite a challenge.
Today, we’ll be recreating the Google Docs’ icon from scratch, using Sketch. This will be a pretty straightforward tutorial for the most part, but it’s going to help us familiarise ourselves with basics of Sketch.
This is what we will be creating in the next 10 minutes.
If you prefer watching the video tutorial instead, you can find it on Dunnnk’s Blog.
Let’s Do It
Before getting down and dirty, let’s take a second to deconstruct our design.
Blue background. This is a simple and primary shape, easily recreated using a rectangle.
Four lines in the middle, with varying sizes. This can also be created using multiple rectangles and resizing the last one to match.
Finally we have two triangles on the top right hand side that act as the paper fold and drop shadow.
The only challenge with this design is going to be figuring out an elegant way to design the folded paper effect on the top right hand side of the icon. We’ll accomplish that with relative ease, using the vector tools to modify our blue backround. This is what the rectangle is going to look like, by the time we’re done with it.
If you prefer watching the video tutorial instead, you can find it on Dunnnk’s Blog.
Step 1 — Create the background
Create a simple rectangle using by pressing the “R” key on your keyboard. Create a rectangle 107px width and 136px height. You can fine tune the size in the Inspector Panel on the right hand side.
Moving a little further down in the inspector panel, find the “Borders” toggle and turn that off.
Find the “Fills” option, located directly above Borders. Click the color picker and change the hex value to #3982FD.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and select your Rectangle layer in the “Layers Panel” on the left hand side. Double click the layer in panel and rename it to Background.
It’s important to stay organised as the complexity of your projects grow.
Step 2 — Create the lines
Using the rectangle tool, by pressing “R” on the keyboard again, create a rectangle shape 58px in width and 6px in height.
Remove the Border just as we did in step one.
Using the Fills option, change the background color to #FFFFFF.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and change the layer name in the “Layers Panel” to Line.
Make sure the Line layer is selected. Using the keyboard shortcut Command+D, duplicate the Line layer three times. You can then drag and drop the lines within 7 pixels of each other.
This is what you should be looking at.
Select the fourth Line layer (this should be the last item you created), and change the width to 34px in the inspector panel on the right.
As a good practice, select all the Line layers, and group them together, using the Command+G keyboard shortcut. Rename the group to Lines.
This is how things should be looking like at this stage.
Step 3 — Create fold and drop shadow
Here comes the fun stuff. Now we’re going to focus our attention on some sexy vector points.
Start by selecting the “Triangle” shape from the “Insert” menu on the top left of Sketch.
Click and drag until you have a 24px by 24px triangle. Just like before, remove the border in the “Inspector Panel” and change the fill hex color to #A0C4FF
Select your newly created triangle in the “Layers Panel” on the left and rename it to Fold.
In the “Layers Panel” select the Background and Fold layer at the same time. You can accomplish this by holding down the Command key as you select the different layers.
We want to make sure the Fold layer and the Background layer are perfectly aligned. So with both layers selected, we’ll go to the “Inspector Panel” on the right and at the top, we’ll use the “Align Right” and the “Align Top” options to align our layers.
Go back to the “Layers Panel” on the left and select ONLY the Fold layer. We are going to use Sketch’s awesome vector tool to create a right isosceles triangle. *Sexy I know ;-)*
Press the Return key on your keyboard to enter the vector mode. This is what it’ll look like.
For time being, ignore everything that’s going on. You want to drag and drop the top point until it’s parallel with the bottom left vector point. Something like this.
Note: Make sure your Y position value is the same as before you moved the vector point.
Press Enter to confirm. Here’s what we should be looking at.
With that done, make sure our Fold layer is still selected. Go ahead and Duplicate the layer. *Remember the keyboard shortcut?*
Once you’ve duplicated the layer, move the newly created layer under the Fold layer, making sure it snaps to pixel at the top and left side.
Be sure to rename the new layer to Dropshadow and group it with Fold.
From the “Inspector Panel” We will then use the “Flip” buttons, to flip our drop shadow layer Vertically and Horizontally.
As before, Using the “Fills” option, change the hex value to #1F53B3.
You are looking at an almost completed design. Just one more step before we’re done.
Step 5 — Make the Fold
We are going to use the vector points to hide the top hand corner of our Background and give it a realistic paper fold effect.
With the Background layer selected, hit enter on your keyboard to enter vector mode. You want to zoom in for this. I’m looking at 64000%.
You want to find the bottom right corner of the Fold layer, and create a new vector point, next to it on the Background layer.
In “Inspector Panel” on the right side, change the curve mode to “Straight”.
This will help create a straight line between this point and any other straight points on the Background layer.
Now you can zoom out a little (maybe 1500%), and find the top right vector point. You want to go ahead and drag that point to the left, until it’s inline with the top corner of our Fold layer.
Here’s what you should be looking at.
Press enter on your keyboard to confirm the changes. Zoom out to 100% by using Command+0 shortcut.
Well done. You’re done. Well… Almost!
The Lines group is not perfectly centered. Instead of telling you how to do it, I’ll leave it to you as a challenge.
In near future I’ll be doing similar tutorials for Dunnnk and publishing them to my Medium, Dunnnk’s Blog and Dunnnk’s Youtube Channel. They’ll range from basic icons to complete apps. Fun times.
Here’s a little taste of what’s coming in the next month.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial. This is my first written how to and I would really appreciate some feedback from the awesome community on Medium.
