Your design team might not be taking the best out of Sketch Data
The love for Sketch is getting stronger day by day. Sometime back, they have moved to an approach of releasing new updates regularly. Some of those updates were minor. But when you collect those little improvements for a longer period of time, Sketch has come a long way. Also, because each update comes with only a few new features, its easy to keep track as well. As everybody says less is more.
But today I am talking about a feature Sketch has released a long time ago, but I think we haven’t got the best out of it, or ignored or somehow missed. The underrated victim is Sketch Data.
Sketch Data
Data was introduced on Sketch 52 back in 2018. With Data, you can instantly populate images on shapes as a background fill. Sketch is preloaded with images of faces and tile patterns. Also, you can populate text. For text, Sketch has preloaded with names and world cities. Also, Sketch has preinstalled Unsplash plugin. From that, you can generate a random image or search for a specific keyword and add that image to your shapes.
Also, you can use Data with symbol overrides as well. If you have a text or a shape with an image as the fill, you can use Data to override.
Custom Data
Adding random faces might not be the most useful feature for your projects. The fun bit about Data is that you can create your own set of Custom Data. That's where this feature is becoming more practical.
You can read more about how to add Custom Data from the Sketch Documentation. Adding a new Data source
Practical application of Data
Almost all new features of a tool feel really useful when you heard about it for the first time. But the actual practical application of it is varying from one user to another. For a very long time, the only thing I did with Data was using it to generate faces and names. After I have started using Custom Data, it became a real time-saver. I can give a few examples where I have used and using Data.
- When I was doing designs for a food delivery app. In most of the pages I designed, I had images of dishes, desserts & drinks. Instead of manually adding images one by one, I did create a Custom data set and stored those in a common folder. So everyone in the team was able to access it and use the same set of images easily. It helped to maintain consistency as well. Also, I have used Data for dish names as well.
- I have designed a job finder website recently. In those designs, I had job titles, descriptions, locations, posted dates and many more. Which was repeating in many places. So I have created text Data lists for each content type individually.
- In the current company I am working for, which is a fuel e-wallet, I’m using Custom Data to generate a list of pump numbers. Seems like this would have been easier if I have just typed those number manually. But here the application is different. In Sketch Data, when you generate text or images for multiple elements at the same time, there are no duplicates. So whenever I wanted a list of pump numbers on a screen, where I don’t need those numbers to be in order, but also without duplicates (e.g. The Admin dashboard, where you can see all active pump numbers), I’m using Custom Data.
The list goes on ….
Plugins
Also, you can create a Data plugin for yourself or your team. You can read this guide from Sketch to learn how to create a Data plugin.
One plugin I really like is Twilio Ipsum. You can check that out from here.
Conclusion: Save time with Sketch Data
In almost every project you are working on, there could be a smart way you can use Custom Data to save your and your team member’s time. Along with your design system, there should be Custom Data as well.
Apart from saving time, using Sketch Data with your team would help you to have a consistent set of designs throughout your app or website. Since the day I started using Sketch Custom Data, it really helped me save a lot of time.
So you also didn’t take advantage of Sketch Data? Or is it just me? 👀
P.S: Maybe I know why Sketch Data was not that famous. It was released along with the Dark Mode. Maybe everybody was distracted because of the dark mode and forgot everything about Data.
