Beginner’s Guide to Sketch Nested Symbols

I was asked to make a step-by-step tutorial on nested symbols by a few friends. I recently learned how to use nested symbols from a SketchTricks article. The article is very helpful, but I got confused and had to play around in Sketch a lot before I really understood how to use nested symbols. This guide is mainly for those who need a more detailed and visual guide to nested symbols.

Introduction to Nested Symbols

If you’ve used Sketch, you’re probably aware of the ability to use symbols. They’re basically stickers (or templates) that you can insert into your document. The handy part about them is that if you modify a symbol, the symbol will be updated throughout the document.

It’s helpful until it’s not. Before I found out about nested symbols, I would get frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how to change the content without changing the formatting of the symbol. Luckily, nested symbols take care of that.

Step 1: Create a separate page for your symbols and make your artboards.

Here are the artboards I created for my example.

In this example, I’m creating a building block of a checklist. The three smaller artboards are symbols I will be nesting within “Checklist”.

Step 2: Name your artboards…carefully. Then, turn them into symbols.

Forward slash (/) is used to organize symbols within the document. You can create subcategories of symbols by naming the artboards with SymbolName/NestedName. The article by SketchTricks advises you to use emojis ( control + command+spacebar on Mac) to help stay organized, which comes in handy in the next part.

Tip: If you’re unfamiliar with creating symbols, right click the the artboard and there will be an option to “Create Symbol”.

Step 3: Use your symbols and change text content in overrides.

Overrides are any elements of the symbol that can be changed within the same symbol. For example:

This is what the symbol and overrides menu on the right looks like when no modifications are made.

You can change the content of the text by typing into the text box provided.

Step 4: Create multiple options for yourself with the overrides.

Earlier, I turned three extra artboards with icon into symbols and subcategorized them under the symbol “Checklist”. If you insert a symbol onto the artboard of another symbol, you can now select different symbols in the override option.

The camera icon used in the “Checklist” symbol is a symbol. Check that out on the left. Since there are three symbols under the subcategory of “Checklist”, now you can use the override menu to choose from these three symbols on your document.

Here, the camera icon is selected. That’s the default.

And now the write icon is selected.

That’s the basics of nested symbols. It’s a great way to keep your design patterns more consistent and work a little faster once you’ve got a handle on how things work. Thanks for reading!