Sketch Tutorials

Setting Up a Design System

Learn how to customize and use Sketch best practices as a robust design system that will save you hundreds of hours on the next project.

This is part of Frames for Sketch — tutorial article that will help you to get started with Frames Design System and customize it to match your brand guidelines, as well as helps you to learn something new about sketch features and tricks that you might not know.

Guide contents:

1. 👀 Overview — A quick look at the main sections.
2. 🍭 Colors — Learn how to add and use colors.
3. 📜 Typography — Replacing system fonts.
4. 🔧 Components — Customizing symbols.
5. 🔌 Plugins — List of helpful plugins for controlling Frames.
6. ❣️ Summary — Use cases and FAQ.

1. Overview — Updated✨

Frames is a product made by a designer with the idea to implement latest Sketch features into a single UI Library by combining best practices and helpful techniques that can save a lot of time in the long run for anyone familiar with sketch app.

The system is designed to be lightweight and adaptable to brands, that why many teams find it a really useful tool for building their own libraries based on it. 🖖

Frames Master file is divided into 5 main pages that contain lots of pre-made contents: components, styles and pre-designed layouts that can be customized and used for making your own UI Kit or a design system (at your prefer).

Note: Frames uses Roboto and Muli google fonts by default, so be sure to install them before first launch.

• Get Started — This is the starting point for newcomers, here you can adjust your colors, styles, and fonts quickly to match your brand.

• Style Guide — Color scheme, component sheet, icons, mockups, and typeface styles all together serve you as the single source of truth for your project.

• Web UI Kit — Collection of pre-designed layouts built with system components that can be freely customized and used for rapid prototyping and turning blue style wireframes into nice looking dribbble shots.

• Charts & Tables — Frames contains a set of 32 Charts + Table components that can be easily customized, resized, and reused so you can focus on working with data instead of vector points.

• Symbols — All are grouped by categories and sorted according to the symbol’s type (Colors, Buttons, Inputs, etc., we will cover all groups just a bit further).

Yep, these 5 pages are making a perfect playground to quickly design apps and website, that saves me tons of hours as a designer. But now let’s move to the Get Started page to begin preparing our system to match the basics of our Brand.

2. Colors

Frames by default contain ten colors that can be changed globally across the document, you only need to select Fill layers and overwrite them with new properties, then apply the changes, and voila everything is synced, and the new color is now available for all components that have a Color attribute in the overrides menu!

Note: You can use gradients globally as well, just convert their layers to symbols and set new symbols size to 100x100.

To add more colors go to the Symbols page and copy any color artboard Copy/Paste it and assign a new color for it. ✂️

Newborn system elements even if they are just colors should follow a naming structure, so the element fit the correct group, think about it as a path to describe your systems folder structure, so be sure to make the changes. For example, Color / Orange makes it possible to find it in overrides of every other system element that have Color properties.

NOTE: the Fill style is used through the whole system and applied to all components as a Color attribute, this also includes Border style Shapes.
(Such as buttons, alerts, badges or tags).

3. Typography

Frames by default is using a simple font combination Roboto+Muli organized from H1 to H5 headers, and a simple font combination can always help you to build eye-catching typography for your project or just dribbble shot. So you can freely customize both the fonts or remove one of them if you need to.

Typography system is built into shared styles with a simple structure:
*H1 / Font Name / Alignment / Color

To change the current font system simply overwrite default text layers with a new setting and spread changes across the land of Frames. Doing so, don’t forget to overwrite old font name from shared text styles menu using super useful plugin — Sketch Text Style Master, just find for font name you want to replace. And by making this, you can easily apply new text properties to all UI Kit layouts.

NOTE: Components such as buttons contain text symbols that will not be overwritten by any changes here, we will cover on how to customize them in the next section.

Now, let’s add some new fonts to the system, so they follow our structure with these simple steps:

1. Choose or duplicate all layers of any font — make any changes you need, and don’t overwrite the shared styles for now.

2. Using the Rename, It plugin activate “find and replace” command on the selected layers and replace default font name in the naming structure with the new one. (Example: from H1 / Roboto.. to H1 / Arial..)

3. And generate new styles from selected text layers, to do so use the Style Generator plugin and press “generate shared styles,” and it’s done, the new font is ready.

Rename It and Style Generator are beneficial tools for this approach.

After you have finished with the customization you can save current fonts styles as a template to quickly import them to every new project using Shared Style Plugin, it will save a huge amount of time, learn more on how to master text in this article. 👇

Text System Mastery with Shared Styles

4. Components

Building blocks of the system are responsive components that are made using symbols sharing a single systematic approach, to follow a Path structure and form logical groups. All symbols are divided into categories by design.

Most of the symbols are built using other symbols. When the symbol is nested inside another symbol it will represent the attribute of visual style that can be quickly adjusted using the overrides menu. (Such as Color, State, Shape or Device.)

Now let’s take a closer look at symbols groups to learn how we can customize them to scale.

Colors

Simplest and one of the most useful symbols — just a block that stores a single Fill color. (width x height = 100px x 100px)

Tip: Use a 50% opacity white color to make your elements such as icons look transparent.

Text

Text symbols are used for Buttons, Inputs, and text areas, to change them overwrite the default values of text layers and changes will sync with the parent element.

Tip: Use Adjust content on resizing option to fit symbols container width when overwriting defaults.

Buttons

Buttons are sorted by size, and are available in the following variations: Basic, Icon on the Right, Icon on the Left, Tab and Text Button. You can also find the Flexible button type with the icon that always stays tightly attached to one of the sides of the text; this buttons are pretty tricky and made using this technique.

To change a button appearance, you need to change the Shape attribute that contains State and Color properties, here an example of how many variations of a single button you may achieve overriding this attributes using default properties.

Forms

The input fields can either be descriptive (with an additional label/caption) or have a basic rectangle-like look. To customize Inputs visuals, use State symbol, overwrite any state layer style to apply your changes.

By changing the Inputs State attribute, you will be able to switch between Basic and Material look quickly.

Shape

Shape symbols represent the form an element such as Buttons, Badges, Tags, and notifications — each shape can be either Fill or Border styled, the Fill color attribute applied to both of them.

Note: Shape symbols can be easily customized by changing Container layer radius properties. Border style shapes are made using outlining with subtract properties, so be sure to change both merged layers radius.

State

State symbols are used to describe element interactions and transformations such as Hover, Active, or Disabled states for buttons or inputs, using them you can manipulate to fit your elements into the current interface situation.

To update Button or Input states, you need to update layers style. You can also add additional effects to the symbols, for example — you can add shadow symbol to any hover state to make it look floating.

Data

Data is a place for second priority UI elements that serve to provide the user with relevant information and describe current interface situation with the help of positive, negative, or warning feedback.

Icons

All Icons are based on a 24px grid, have very material-like style and carry Color attribute that always matches your color scheme, so whenever you see an Icon element inside a button or input — know that you can easily swap it with any other icon from the list or change its color.

Most frequently used icons are made in two styles: Fill and Stroke.

Mockups

Mockups are used to present your visual content like photos, beautiful background, and device screens, you can change the appearance of mockup by changing the Device attribute.

Using Screen options, you can add overlays to obscure your image with a black-to-white gradient or put FIll attribute as a tint to increase text readability above the photos.

Frames include mockups of iPhone 7, Macbook and iPad Air made with the help of Facebook design resources.

You can add your mockups as and PNG layer to a symbol and set the right proportions for the Screen symbol to match devices picture, learn more on how to use mockups here and don’t forget to grab freebie file. 👇

A better way to use mockups in Sketch

5. Plugins

Frames can be controlled and extended using plugins. This means you can make super wild moves across your document; for example, you can easily sync Frames sketch library and have a secure version control with your team using Abstract app. Find out more friendly use cases and extensions that you can use along with Frames.👇

Sketch Tools for Managing a Design System

6. Summary

After you configure the basic styles and bring the components to the desired view, you can have a fully charged design system at your service that is ready to be plugged into any project. You can additionally save the file as a template to always have Frames by the hand.

Psst. You do not need to customize everything to get started, setting up your brand colors is pretty enough to start designing great looking products.

Using Frames is rewarding and gives you an ability to change your design on the fly by overwriting symbols, Okay, yeah — we got it. But what are real use cases this system is good at?

Use cases

• Prototyping, even if the deadline is coming in 10 minutes, you can quickly build a website page or style guide for your client.
• Build a brand UI kit, use a pre-made style to overwrite them with yours, and test your visual ideas by building your design language.
• Wireframing, using premade content, you can quickly build wireframes and discuss your ideas before moving to final asset design.
• Learn something new, become more expert with Sketch, and stay up to date to latest features and techniques that can save your day.
• Sync, if you are working on a project with your colleagues, use Frames to collaborate and design with the same building blocks that are synchronized.

Do more in less time, move fast, and build stronger. 🏃🏻‍

If you still don’t have the system, you can visit Frames for Sketch website to get the full version of the product, or download the Demo file and explore more closely.

FAQ

How to get the latest version?
We send email notifications via Gumroad and tweet when the new version is released, so be sure to follow us, and if you already bought Frames go to the Product page and download the latest version.

Want to suggest a feature or need more help?
Cool! Feel free to reach us and discuss it via hello@robowolf.net.

Are you planning to make Adobe or Figma versions?
Maybe in the future, until these tools provide the same flexibility as Sketch does.

What differs your product from other design systems?
Frames are built into a system through tons of changes due to constant Sketch updates and a product design experience, now anyone who masters it will be granted with an ability to generate and scale design systems for a mid/large client fast.

I haven’t tried any other system on the market, but I believe the world is a big place, and there are pretty many designers just like me. 😁

Before you leave

• Find more Frames related resources on Sketch App Sources.
• Help us spread the word about Frames for Sketch and get 25% off. Just email us / tweet us / DM us the link to your post, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
• Follow Robowolf for more design related stuff.