Flexibility with Nested Colors in Sketch

The Problem

Symbol embedding is one of those cool features that makes our life a little easier. However, in search for the ultimate flexibility and ability to customise, most Designers will find that Sketch too has its limitations.

In a perfect world, designers would be able to design a control starting with the groundwork, the atoms (primitive shapes, text, images, colour) and work their way up to organisms (forms, wizards, etc), as well as define in what way those molecules are flexible, how they interact with other molecules or how the organisms they are part of interact with other organisms part of the same template by means of position, rotation, colour, font size, font paragraph style, corner roundness, etc.

That does not say however, that creative fellows haven’t found out ways to circumvent this by imaginative ways of using sketch and the plethora of plugins that it supports.

The Solution

My preferred approach is to use masking and embed colors into my designs to allow for flexibility of interchangeable palettes. This makes even much more sense if we’re thinking about this in terms of scaling to a internal Design System with a pre-set color palette that needs to be consistent across domains to allow for accurate communication and branding.

Ok, but how ?

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of it then.

Step 1: Define your “Mask”

In my Example, The “Mask” is a normal rectangle

What happens next is a bit of magic, sprinkled with fairy dust and some very sketchy s**t.

Step 1.A:You’re going to create a new rectangle which you’re going to define as a symbol.

Ok, ok, so I made 2. Shoot me !

Step 1.B: You’re going to use the Background layer and set to to “Mask”

Blue was the name I chose for my symbol

Step 2: Profit.

Meanwhile I made some minor adjustments so that that nasty dropshadow is no longer “creme brulee”

You can now Switch between colors on the fly. How cool is that ?

Alternatively, you can see short how-to on youtube by following this link: https://youtu.be/U6EILdCSVCc

How can this be taken further..

Well, you can mix and match, you can even create text smart symbols with 2 or more color sets and you can switch between them like a baws. Or you know… get creative. Ultimately this is there to make your designer life easier.

Some examples:

3 Different Backgrounds all made from the same symbol. You can switch between colors, font colors and font weights.

UPDATE: For those interesting in working with embedded type like in my pic above and how it can be useful, stay tuned. An article is in the making!

Enjoy and give it a Clap if you learned something new. :)