Best Practices for Sketch
Create a better, faster, more efficient workflow to maximize your potential and wow your clients.
Have you ever gotten knee deep in a project and gotten frustrated by your own naming conventions? Did you neglect to make a repeated element into a symbol and now you’re having to change each one manually?
What does this really mean? It means far more than a headache, it’s lost productivity, it’s a struggling workflow, it’s lost time and resources that can really put you behind in any complex project.
Let's talk best practices. How can you set yourself up for success?
1. Use Symbols
Well, what are symbols?
Symbols are an incredibly powerful tool in sketch that helps maintain design consistency and standards by eliminating the need to create the same element, over, and over, and over, and… over.
You’re able to designate one parent symbol and this root symbol is the original design standard for every instance the symbol is used.
What does this mean?
It means that if you need to make a change, you can edit the parent symbol directly and it will globally change all the children elements. This way you can change the color of the parent element, and every child element will change too. This is incredibly useful for productivity and time and will eliminate the tedious process of changing every single icon’s color. This could save you hours depending on your project’s scope and reach.
2. Name your Symbols with organization in mind
This tip is a little bit of a non-intuitive one. I didn’t realize this could be done until I was reading Sketch’s documentation one day and saw this by chance.
You are able to name symbols and organize them into categories by using a forward slash after each category. If the category already exists, it just adds it to the previously created category with the other symbols. If the category hasn’t yet been created, it creates one for you. You can even nest sub categories within categories through the use of additional forward slashes. It’s a little confusing to read about so I’ll also show you visually.
3. Name Your Layers
You think this would be obvious, but it can be tempting to prioritize creating with speed over creating with empathy for future you. Be your own best friend on this one and name your layers, break them apart and name your groups, elements, lines, etc. It will be very beneficial down the road if you have good organizational strategies in place as the projects you work on get more complicated. This also becomes an essential part of collaborating on digital design projects with a team. Keeping the naming conventions, clear, consistent, and organized will help your team understand referenced components and layers during meetings, work sessions, and conversation.
4. Use Layer & Text Styles
Using Layer & Text Styles can also help to keep your designs consistent, uniform, and become incredibly important when you need to implement change. As I mentioned before with Symbols, Layer & Text Styles are global styles that can be applied to elements. This means that you are able to change the color of a particular layer style or a font of a text style and all the elements with the assigned Layer & Text Styles will also change.
Similar to naming Symbols, you can use the forward slash when naming Layer & Text Styles to create categories to sort the styles into. You can also create nested styles with the use of multiple forward slashes.
Example Of Layer Style for Button:
The graphic above shows the layer style on the right side panel under the Appearance section. You are able to create a style that remembers the style in the Button group.
Now when we view styles we can see there are two layer styles under the Buttons category as shown below.
By using forward slashes, you are able to sort and organize layer styles, text styles, and Symbols into categories to keep the project organized as it expands and begins to get complex.
5. Keep a separate page called symbols where you have all of the original parent symbols, layer styles, and text styles
This helps you find the original parent quickly and efficiently through the layers panel. This saves time from having to dig through the designs to find the random parent Symbols scattered throughout. I will show you how mine looks.
Now updating the master Symbol is a breeze! No more digging and looking around through your surface compositions. It is also useful to keep the master text styles and layer styles on separate pages as well. It can help you stay organized and efficient.
Final Thoughts
It is easy to get lost in the sauce. What I mean by that is when you start cooking up your ideas and taking your projects to the next level, they start to get more complicated. It’s easy to lose sight of where your original symbols are, where your element is in the layer panel, etc. If you take away one thing and nothing else, let it be this. Organization is king. Be friendly to your team and your future self. Optimize your workflow and prosper from the results.
If you’d like to see my final prototype for the project featured in this post, you can interact with it below.
Sarah Mendez is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to Extra Curricular Exploration and is representative of the skills learned.
