Auto Layout Plugin for Sketch — Improve your workflow in 10min
Today’s article is all about the Auto Layout Plugin by Animaapp. If you are an UI/UX Designer or an Developer and you don’t know it yet, it will improve your workflow tremendously — I promise! So stick with me to learn how to use it.
What can I do with the Plugin?
Nowadays it’s essential, that an App looks great on every screen size and every device. You probably start with the iPhone 7 Artboard and then manually design another version for a smaller, a bigger or an android device. So did I! But these times are over now. By adding so called Pins to your design, you can specify how each element should change when you resize your screen-design. Let me give you some examples
How do I use it?
It’s very easy. As I mentioned before all you have to do is adding Pins to your shapes. By adding these Pins you specify the padding between the element and the selected side. You can pin it to the top, left, right or to the bottom of the screen. Furthermore you can align the element horizontally and vertically.
Now that you know the basics, let’s step into an example. I’m sure you know but if you want to resize your screen without using the Auto Layout Plugin nothing will happen.
To show you the functionality of the plugin I created this simple mockup.
Click on the oval and adopt the following settings. You can choose between pixels and percentages but I highly encourage you to use the percentage one.
Same thing for the rectangle. After applying the settings below, we are almost done with our first screen.
Now click on the Artboard, grab an edge and resize your screen. The result should look like this.
Let’s make it look more like an actual User Interface. I used the Content Creator tool to select a random profile picture. The colour of the background is #1b142d and the button colour is #ff004d. I added a text shape and grouped it with the rounded rectangle. For the group apply these settings.
Now that we’ve done this click on this Icon on the right which shows a mobile and a tablet. Select ‘Generate Overview’.
This should create a new file like this.
And that’s it. You’ve just created a design for the most common devices within a few minutes.
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