Sketch Tutorials

Sketch Tools for Managing a Design System

List of sketch app extensions for organizing and maintaining a user interface collection.

Building a well-structured asset collection is prevalent duty among the designers. This non-material form of life can grow wild along with your brand, constantly generating a variety of different challenges for you or your team.

If you ever stepped this path, here is a list of helpful tools that can extend sketch app functionality to help you at different stages of making a design system, eliminating unnecessary pixel pushing and keeping the document clean and useful, so you have time to enjoy a good day.

Listed plugins are compatible and were used during the process of making the Frames Design System possible and other Robowolf products as well. Many thanks to the authors and contributors of these helpful little buddies.

Frames for Sketch — Web Design System

Runner

Download — http://sketchrunner.com/

Most popular and well-known around sketch community — a must have a plugin that will benefit your workflow with a wide range of perks, here is my top 5 when it comes to a scalable project.

• Quick navigation through multiple libraries, components, or just symbols.
• Super fast for finding and installing other plugins.
• Grants additional slots in your inventory, by integrating a separate runner menu into the sketch toolbar.
• Can apply shared styles to multiple layers.

• Runner menu can help you manage favorite plugins and what more important individual commands which are super useful if you install 2–5 plugins per day, and have a mess in the plugin menu.

You can even add separators to make groups into it. 😱

Rename It

Download — http://rodi01.github.io/RenameIt/

Keeping all assets organized will force you to rename, rename a lot of symbols, layers, and artboards. Rename it plugin makes all the hard work, use it to quickly find and replace names of any sketch objects and replace them with the new one. Making possible lighting speed changes within the whole kit structure.

Use 🔍 to divide symbols into different categories and menu groups

• The plugin has good-helpful rename results in the preview section.
• You can use keywords to predefine precise results.

Sketch Style Master

Download — https://github.com/aparajita/sketch-style-master

An excellent plugin which adds text style management functionality to sketch app, this means no more need to manually click on every text style name in a narrow window to rename a certain style. This tool gives a lot of cool options when it comes to working with text styles allowing to control your type styles very easy, and even more.

• Has a flexible search that helps you to find and override multiple text styles quickly.
• Has a helpful preview UI with an option to see through all of the used text styles.
• Very helpful for organizing and storing text styles into groups using basic naming structure, for example, Roboto / Body / Black
• Always helps me to swap fonts within the document quickly:

Swapping typefaces and keeping the text style menu hierarchy. 💎

Symbol Manager

Website — https://gumroad.com/l/sketch-symbols-manager

This plugin allows you to create folders for your symbols and organizes a structure by dragging symbols from one folder to another with a finder style interface. Paid, and still have some interactions to polish, but author makes updates, so I hope this approach will evolve or replaced by native options because internal symbol manager could do a great job in the process of organizing large documents.

• Changes made to the selections will affect the naming of each symbol.

Symbol Organizer

Download — https://github.com/sonburn/symbol-organizer

If you ever tried organizing your symbol page manually you know the pain, but thanks to this useful plugin which makes possible to quickly structurize your symbol page into visual groups determined by symbols name in alphabetical order, very helpful at the final design stages when preparing your collection for the showdown.

You can predefine the groups using “/” in the symbol names.

Abstract

Download — https://www.goabstract.com/

Building a scalable UI kit is always hard work of different persons. When moving through in a team you will face the need for everyone to stay on the same page and back check the previous collaborator’s iteration, Abstract allows anyone in the team to have access to the same master file, as well as other helpful features.

• Just like Github always have an option to branch from the master file to create your version of the document.
• Review changes and choose which one to keep and which one to remove.
• Use the version history log to collaborate using comments and commits.

Tip — always open master file from Abstract, this will keep all changes made to your file remembered/recorded by Abstract app.

Memorable mentions

• Sketch measures — Great to create specs and export assets for developers and colleagues, if you are not using Zeplin or Sympli for this purpose.
• Merge duplicate symbols — Helpful for escaping disorder in your master file and merge components with name-duplicate symbols.
• Unused Style Remover — Find any instances of a shared layer or text style and remove them.
• Symbol state — Gives you the ability to save overrides in any symbol as different component states for further chance to switch between them.
• Keys — Use it to bind a sequence of combos via key shortcuts, for example, ⌃⌘A [Select All Artboards] + ⌘RF [Resize to Fit Content] — to quickly on/off resizing artboard properties.

Before you leave

Frames for Sketch — Web Design System

Get your self a copy of Frames Design System and save yourself hundreds of hours working on a new project in Sketch app, Frames is easy to customize and adapt to your brand. ☝️

• Download Frames free resources, visit → Sketchappsources.com
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