Become a Sketch Pro with 9 Tiny Tips
For a while Sketch has been our go-to app to create our tasty designs. It’s quick, versatile and focused on User Interface design. There are many hidden secrets in Sketch and we wanted to share a few of our favorites.
1. Change a Property by 10px or 0,1px
When you want to change a property by 1 pixel, you can easily click on the arrow-up or arrow-down when you hover the input field. However, you can also jump by 10px when you hold shift or jump by 0,1 when you hold alt / option (⌥).
2. Hide Labels From Your Symbols
When you lock a layer inside of your symbol, it won’t show up as a value to edit when you use the symbol (h/t Nir Benita).
3. Align Anchor Points with the Align Tools
The align tools in the top right of Sketch are great tools to make sure your designs are perfectly aligned. What we learned is that you can actually also use these tools for anchor points inside of your shapes, not only Groups and Layers. This makes it super easy to perfectly align anchor points within your shapes.
4. One Symbol to Rule All Textual NavBar States
Instead of having to create a separate symbol for each state of a navigation bar, you can actually combine them into one symbol so you only have to maintain one symbol for style updates. The trick, to hide text layers, is to use a [SPACE] as the value for a text layer from your symbol (h/t anise).
5. Keyboard Shortcut: Exit your Symbol Instance
We’re all about using keyboard shortcuts to increase your speed. You can exit a Symbol Instance by using CMD+ESC.
6. Drag & Drop on an Image Fill
The title says it all. If you use a shape with an image fill (great for avatar), you can actually just drop an image on that little window in Sketch to change the image super fast.
7. Use Icon Fonts in Symbols for Flexible Icons
When you set the font of a text layer to an Icon Font, you can have variable icons in your Symbol and change them on the fly. Especially good for wireframing, read all about it here: https://twitter.com/benjennin_gs/status/746126185516535808 .
8. Change your Nudge Value
We usually work with an 8px grid and by default the SHIFT+ARROW nudge is 10px. We changed this to 8px so you’re always nudged exactly on your grid. Use Nudg.it to change the default nudge values in Sketch.
9. Make Shapes Bigger
You can easily increase the size of your shape, based on your grid, by using CMD + Arrow Keys (small nudge) or CMD + Shift + Arrow Keys (big budge).
