Keeping your design files clean
(with the help of a few Sketch plugins)
For the past year, as a design team of one, I’ve constantly been jumping from project to project. In doing so, I’ve had a chance to optimise a design process that ensures all projects are set up in a similar manner.
This way, when I come back to them I can actually remember where I put stuff, how it works and reduce the time spent “getting back up to speed”.
It’s made a massive different to my productivity!
After reading Monzo’s latest blog post today (👏 👏 👏 great article guys) about their process and their new plugin, File Cleaner. It made me realise I follow a similar set up, however rather than using 1 plugin I use several. The benefit to this is flexibility.
I thought I’d share a few links for anyone who’s seen Monzo’s article, agrees it’s an awesome workflow, but would like to tweak a few things along the way.
File Cleaner by Monzo
First up, what is File Cleaner? And what does it do?
File Cleaner will, with one keyboard shortcut (ctrl+shift+L), does this….
It will…
- Check that you’ve named all the pages and artboards correctly
- Check there’s no duplicate artboards
- Align all the screens to the grid
- Place new screens in the right place in their flow
- Re-order the left panel so artboards are in their correct place
Their plugin is amazing you should definitely check it out, to see if it will help your workflow.
Downsides to File Cleaner
It’s a very rigid process. What if:
- I don’t want a page called “Master”?
- I want other pages?
- I want my artboards to be called something totally random, not a just a list of sequential numbers?
- I want my artboards to be spaced smaller/larger?
Well you could achieve this by doing all those steps manually. However, as Zander at Monzo points out, that would be a painful and timely process. So with the help of a few plugins, I thought I’d demo how you can still take inspiration from File Cleaner and still save loads.
Essential Plugins
Sketch Mate (🤑 Free)… for aligning and distributing objects, reversing positions, sorting layer panel (and many other things).
Sketch Cleaner (🤑 $2+)… for sorting artboards based on X or Y position (and like Sketch Mate does many other things too).
Rename It (🤑 Free)… for, well… renaming stuff.
🏃🏿♂️ Sketch Runner (🤑 Free)… for triggering actions, and runing menu commands quickly.
The Process
Sketch Mate
First of all we still want to space our artboards evenly and align them to the top. Sketch Mate has features for spacing in the X and Y by however many pixels you input into the dialog.
It also has ability to align layers top, bottom centre of artboard, or central to selection.
Sketch Cleaner
Amazing for tiding up that layers panel so it actually reflects the order of your artboards.
This is really important when it comes to renaming. So that when you choose to add a number in the name using Rename It, they’re output in sequential order (Rename It works on layer order not on a layers x/y position).
Pro Tip: Sketch Mate also has 2 killer features, Reverse Order and Reverse Layer Positions. Both are really useful if you’ve just duplicated a load of layers/artboards and know you want them in an A-Z order rather than the Z-A order that Sketch uses by default.
Notes: You could use Sketch Mate to sort Artboards by Top/Left if you would like. This would save the $2 it costs for Cleaner. But Cleaner is worded better (X and Y), and is easer to spot if you’re using Sketch Runner.
Also Anima AutoLayout is my go to plugin for aligning and spacing… but it wont work with artboards. Hence the need for Sketch Cleaner or Sketch Mate.
Rename It
Now you’ve got your layers in order you want to name them adding a sequential number to the end.
Rename it is super cool, you can pull existing text like Current Layer Name, Parent Name. But also include Ascending Numbers. This is vial to organising steps in a flow or naming different versions.
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Sketch
Because a lot of these plugins I use many times a day I’ve set up custom keyboard shortcuts for a lot of these actions.
Learn how to set up keyboard shortcuts from the awesome Pablo Stanley
My Shortcuts for this include…
To create even space between layers/artboards
Space Horizontally 🎹 ctrl+alt+cmd+[
Space Vertically 🎹 ctrl+alt+cmd+]
*Need Sketch Mate plugin for this to work
To align stuff
Horizontally 🎹 ctrl+cmd+[
Vertically 🎹 ctrl+cmd+]
Top* 🎹 ctrl+cmd+↑
Bottom* 🎹 ctrl+cmd+↓
Left* 🎹 ctrl+cmd+←
Right* 🎹 ctrl+cmd+→
* Defaults with Sketch Mate plugin
To Rename It
Rename Selected Layers* 🎹 ctrl+cmd+R
* Defaults with Rename It plugin
🏃🏿♂️️ Sketch Runner
If shortcuts aren’t your thing (or not sure you’ll remember them), I’d recommend Sketch Runner. It will save you time searching for actions rather than clicking through the menus trying to find them (📚 further reading).
Also, if you are obsessed with Sketch Runner, definitely check out Alfred for the Mac with countless extensions and time saving features.
To launch Sketch Runner I’ve tweaked the shortcut to be similar to Alfred.
Run… 🎹 ctrl+cmd+space
(which is the same as the emoji picker to I use Rocket for writing emoji)
Putting it all together
Ok so it’s taking a little longer than File Cleaner here. But the point is, you can take inspiration form Monzo’s workflow, and you now have the some flexibility to make it work for yourself.
Hopefully you found this useful, if you have other plugins that you use daily, or maybe your workflow is even more optimised than this, leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you 👊
