11 Must Have Sketch Plugins to Improve Your Design Workflow

Runner

Have you use Alfred before? Runner is a spotlight search designed for Sketch. You can use this plugin to run, jump, insert, create, apply, install plugins with Shortcut Key: command ⌘ + ' .

Prism

Plugin to export your document color into meaningful palette.
First you need to add new color into document color. After that you can use shortcut key control ^ + command ⌘ + C to create beautiful color palette into artboard.

RenameIt

With this plugin, you can have organised naming convention for the layer you created in the artboard. Copy and Paste is alway the designer’s weapon. Since it is too easy to copy and paste a layer, the naming of the layer alway been messed up. With RenameIt, no more messy naming in the artboard. Shortcut to activate the plugin: control ^ + command ⌘ + R.

Anima

Never give excuses not to have responsive design! With Anima, you can create a constraint based layout just like a coder does. The powerful UI base constraint definition help to understand the layout constraint easily. You can create the preview for multiple resolution at once. Don’t forget smaller device user!

Paddy

Have you ever changing the layer size manually everytime there is a copy change to a button or view? It’s somehow very troublesome to change the size manually, how about create a button with defined padding! With paddy you can simple define the padding of [top, left, bottom, right] without a pain! Shortcut Key: control ^ + option ⌥ + P.

Select Similar Layer
With a good naming convention, you can alway select the right layer inside every single artboard. You can then apply the changes to want to all the layers at once. Its not only working on same layer name, it also work on the layers with other same attributes like fill color, border color, font and size, etc. Shortcut key vary from control ^ + option ⌥ + 1 – 8.

Symbol Organizer
Symbol is the most useful function in sketch. By creating symbol, we can ensure the consistency of design across the whole project. However once there are more and more symbols are created, the symbol page will became messy and hard to maintain. With this plugin, once you have added or removed symbol, use Shortcut Key control ^ + option ⌥ + command ⌘ + O to reorgainze your symbol!

Select Child Layer
When we create UI component, we always group our layer into multiple hierarchies, sometime if you want to select all the layers under the parent group can be troublesome, with this plugin you can select all the child layer all the way down into the nested group. Shortcut Key: option ⌥ + command ⌘ + A.

Pixel Perfecter
Having a have layer at a coordinate of half pixel or 0.345 pixel is very annoying since designer are pixel perfect OCDs… With this simple plugin, you can find out which layer is not laying on the right pixel and fix it with Shortcut Key shift ⇧ +control ^ + option ⌥ + command ⌘ + P.

Craft
Craft have a few powerful functions. However the one i want to highlight is dynamic content injection and layer duplication.
With Craft, you can now duplicate a layer and arrange it into a grid with uniform padding.

Batch Create Symbol
I Love this plugin a lot! Have you ever wanting to select multiple layer and convert into symbol respectively? With this plugin, you are able to create multiple symbols with Shortcut Key: control ^ + shift ⇧ + B.

I have create a sample combination of usage of the plugins that I recommended above. I demo how to create a dynamic self sizing button which is fully customisable on corner radius and background color.

Create color symbol. Plugin -> Runner, Craft, RenameIt, Select Similar Layer

Create color palette. Plugin -> Prism

Create a straight corner and round corner frame color symbol. Plugin -> Craft, Paddy

Create a centered dynamic self sizing button. Plugin -> Paddy.

Demo on how to use the self sizing button.

How to use Anima and Paddy seamlessly

Paddy is especially useful when you want to create a dynamic sizing button, for example you can create a button with 15px of padding in every edge which is center align in the view.

1. Create a Rect and a Text. Group both layers together. control ^ + option ⌥ + P and enter 15.
2. In Anima, define horizontal center.

How about create a button with 15px of padding in every edge but having a outer left and right edge padding of 15px as well? Sound complicated right?

But with Paddy and Anima its super easy!

1. Create a Rect and a Text. Group both layers together.
2. This time we only enter top and bottom padding using control ^ + option ⌥ + P. Enter 15 x.
3. In Anima. define left and right padding by 15.
4. However how to ensure in the button have 15px intrinsic padding left and right if the text is too long and became 2 lines? Yes, navigate inside the group of the both layer, resize the Text and ensure left and right is 15px from the Rect. That’s it!

Trust me you will love it :) 😊