Arrange Artboards Hierarchically — A Sketch plugin to arrange artboards hierarchically

We all use some plugin or technique to automatically arrange artboards in Sketch. My favourite is Artboard Tools by frankko. It allows you to arrange artboards in a grid, grouping them by artboard name (rows and columns, whatever you prefer), and has a handy extra feature to reverse artboards order in your artboard list.

However, it’s quite easy to get a several-levels-deep structure in Sketch. Think of your Symbols page, with all of those symbols grouped by concept/component; or those pages where you have several main screens, but also some variations of them to represent interactions or states.

When I have an artboard hierarchy, I end up arranging artboards manually. How time-consuming and fragile is that?

The Grouping artboards feature is awesome (and we keep using it in many scenarios), but becomes useless when you’ve got a hierarchy.

So… we built a Sketch plugin to be able to do arrange artboards hierarchically :)

Arrange Artboards Hierarchically

The Arrange Artboards Hierarchically plugin will automatically arrange all artboards in the selected page according to their name (based on the Sketch Slash naming pattern).

I’d recommend using the vertical approach (arranging them in columns), but there’s an option to have them represented horizontally (in rows) too.

The plugin

You may find the Arrange Artboards Hierarchically plugin on Sketch Runner or directly on GitHub. Soon on Sketchpacks.

This tools can also help…

If you’re using Sketch, this plugins will definitely boost your productivity:

Merge Duplicates helps you get rid of duplicated symbols, but now it also enables you to merge text & layer styles, and even similar styles!

Sketch Styler assigns styles automatically to all of your unstyled layers. It will scan your Sketch files for unstyled texts and look which of the existing styles (in the file or in linked libraries) match best for them.

Sketch Manager makes it so easy to keep your files tidy and clean by organizing your symbols, layer styles and text styles in a Finder-like-UI.

Go give ’em a try and let us know how they worked for you!

Bonus tip

Arranging artboards manually shouldn’t be an option anymore. It’s highly time-consuming and extremely fragile if someone else will be working in the same design file.

Take some time to define with your teammates which tools you will use regarding Artboard/Symbol arrangement and stick to them. It will save you lots and lots of time!

That’s all, folks! Hope it helps!

Considering a gift? :)

What a great plugin — Donate 3€

Wow! That really helped me! — Donate 5€

This totally saved my life! Shut up and take my money! :) — Donate 10€