Chevanon Photography

Embedded Drop Shadows: A red herring ?

Ever since I can remember working with Symbols for the first time, I always wanted to create customizable dropshadows that can be switch on or off on the fly, change their opacity etc.

However, as it stands, Sketch simply does not support this.

From the Shadows I come

Ok, ok, no more game references. I promise.

First off, let’s see how shadows work in Sketch right now:

For nice effects, one must stack shadows and fiddle around to get that perfect blurry effect.

We’ve all been there. Fiddled around with the parameters, pulled our hairs, our opacity sliders, etc.

All of this, for us to create the PERFECT dropshadow effect. I know your struggle and your pain. I share it with you daily.

Then we go about creating styles for all those shadow types we need. Blue shadow ? Blue style. Red shadow ? Red Style.

But what happens if you need to change any of those colors ?

You get REKT. If you’re like me, you hate changing/editing a Style. I’d rather drive a fork through my eye than work with styles. Why ?

Well, if I change the style, It propagates that change across the board to all types of graphics that are using it. And in some cases it’s just not fitting.

Say I have a 40px rectangle I apply a dropshadow to. It looks fine.

Say I’m using the same style to a larger item. I need to adapt the style.

Say my style looks like this:

Fuuuuuuuck!

In this case, we only have 3 colors, but imagine a complex 5–6 levels shadow with 5–6 colors & opacities. I’d need to go and tweak each individual color. NOOOOOOOO!

Enter the dragon

Or the red herring. Switchable Shadows.

They can fill a very particular gap where styles shortcome and they do it with a visual excellence that left me pretty dumbfounded.

How does this work though ? Well. It’s quite a simple thing really. It relies on a odd combo of embedded colors and clever grouping and masking.

Right: A normal dropshadow, with color stacking. Left: The embedded dropshadow.

Normally, the best-feeling type of shadow is created by blurring a shape. The sketch stack-type shadow is nice, but it’s such a pain in the ass to make.

What if I told you..

You can also change the color of that shadow on the fly ?

Yep. There. I said it.

Let me show you how:

Switch between whatever shadow you want.

1. Full Shadow, 2.70% Shadow, 3.15% Opacity (forgot to update the name of the resource)

How do I achieve this

Magic.

Not really. Just some creative use of sketch. Since explaining this with pics would be too complicated, I’m going to just show you:

A mini-walkthrough

As usual, enjoy, and give it a Clap, if you learned something new. :)