Sketch Plugin: Generate connection flow arrows for sitemaps and user flows
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Plugin for Sketch to create connection flow arrows for creating user flows, sitemaps and many more. Saves hours if you are doing them in Sketch.
Just select two objects and click on “Plugins” → “👉 Connection Arrows” → “Create Connection” and voilà! It will create a connection with arrow 🚀
🥳 Bonus at the end of the article
Motivation
In our day to day activities, we are creating a lot of diagrams in EPAM. I realized that most of my time is spent on connecting and drawing arrows for the diagrams. There are some tools like realtimeboard for doing that, but personally, I like doing everything in Sketch 😋
I searched a lot and couldn’t find a plugin, that was able to create a simple arrow between two selected layers. That’s why I started to develop a plugin, that could help me with that.
The cool thing about this plugin is that it creates vector shape arrows and adds all the arrows to the bottom of the layer list as a locked group. Because of that, arrows will not disturb you while interacting with all the other layers and you can draw a connection with any type of layer 🕺
Download Plugin
You can find the most recent version here or install in via Sketchpacks 😍
How it works
Create a connection
Select more than one layer in Sketch and click on “Plugins” → “Connection Arrows” → “Create Connection”
Update all connections inside artboard
Select artboard where all the arrows are stored and click on “Plugins” 👉 “Connection Arrows” → “Update Connection” → “From the Selected Artboard”
Delete connection between two layers
Select layers that have a connection and click on “Plugins” → “Connection Arrows” → “Delete Connection” → “Between Selected”
Extra Features
Inside settings, you can find more features like arrow direction, spacing, and auto-align 😍 If you need anything else, please write to me on Spectrum 👇
Arrow Direction
By the default you will have an “Auto” mode, that will draw arrows based on the position of the second layer but if you are creating user flows or sitemap, where all the arrows are pointed in one direction, you can specify it in settings.
Arrow Spacing
For saving time and not moving all the layers one by one, you can pre-define spacing in settings. When you will create or update connection between two objects, it will automatically move the second layer for a specified amount of pixels ✌️
Auto-align
If your second object is misaligned for less than 5px with this option turned on the plugin will auto-align the second object based on the direction. So you don’t need to spend time aligning everything 🤘
Specify own hotkeys
If you would like to speed up more, you can specify own hotkeys inside Mac OS settings. With the same approach, you can specify hotkeys for any other actions in Sketch
More detailed tutorial 👇
Bonus: Sketch Interactions Library
I’m happy that you’ve read the whole article and I have something more for you! 🥳
If you would like to contribute or just say “Hi 👋”, please do it in Spectrum. And big thanks to EPAM.com and DesignSpot for all the support ❤️
You can write to me directly via mssg.me/farid or find me on Instagram or Dribbble as @faridsabitov
