Top 5 Most Useful Plugins

12 Days of Sketch | Day 7

Sketch is a great design tool, but its real power comes from bringing the community together to make it even better! There are hundreds of Plugins for Sketch available for download. In this article, I’ve curated three top lists of the plugins, most useful open source, most useful paid, most useful niche, most fun to play with, and pro level!

#1 Anima

Anima is basically three plugins wrapped in one!

First, there’s Auto-Layout which is a powerful responsive design system that will save you tons of time in Sketch! In addition to pinning elements and groups, you can set orientation, select and edit size presets, and even create stacks or add padding to groups.

If you want to design and publish a website, Anima Launchpad is the plugin for you! With this plugin, you can create and publish a website directly from Sketch, no coding needed. You can even set breakpoints, hover states, interactive forms, embed video, manage everything down to analytics and custom domains, and much more!

The last of the three Anima plugins is Timeline, which allows for Interaction design integration to be done directly in Sketch. With Timeline, you can create keyframe animations with your layers, create states and add transitions to states, assign actions, and specify animation delays, durations, and curves.

With an Anima subscription, you can also export your animations right to HTML & CSS.

#2 Sketch Runner

This one’s an Atomic Robot favorite! Sketch Runner gives you the ability to find things you would typically search nested dropdowns for with just the keyboard! This plugin allows you to jump around your document, apply styles, install other plugins, create styles and symbols, and insert your symbols.

#3 Craft

If you’re an InVision user, Craft is a must-have plugin. Similar to Anima, Craft is a handful of plugins wrapped into one. I’ll only highlight the Data feature, but feel free to head over to their site to check out all the great features!

The Data feature, with this feature you are able to plug in photos by category, or from a specific source such as Unsplash. This feature also allows you to say goodbye to Lorum Ipsum, and hello to useful placeholder copy. You can add names, articles by category, dates, currency, cities, addresses and more.

#4 Chart

If you’re working with data visualization at all, Chart is the plugin for you! With this plugin, you can easily create all sorts of charts including line, pie, donut, candlestick, and vertical bar charts, and many more! All releases for this plugin above Sketch 52 is available at the very reasonable price of $10/year.

#5 Icondrop

I typically like to curate my own icon set specific to the project or use a set within the client’s brand guidelines, but that takes time and resources that are typically not available in the early stages of a project. Icondrop brings those sometimes tedious icon searches right into Sketch, and with just a tap on the icon, it will download and insert it right into your document.

Summary

I hope you find some of these plugins useful, I know I sure do!

Want more? Stay tuned for 12 Days of Sketch, Day 8: 5 Fun Sketch 52 Plugins!

If you enjoyed this article please give us a follow or some claps! Your support keeps us writing more content; feel free to DM us with content requests! Instagram Twitter Dribbble LinkedIn

We’re posting Sketch tips and tricks every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until the holidays, so stay tuned for more tips and tricks!

Learn more about Atomic Robot.