Intelligent Breadcrumbs with Sketch
My go-to app for creating wireframes and layouts is Sketch. It’s fast, it creates very small files, and most importantly of all I can change and update elements and styles within my designs much more quickly than I would have done with Photoshop. Yes, I really like @Sketchapp.
Each update brings more features, with some more obvious that others. I find that I’m constantly finding little nuggets within Sketch that really help to speed up my workflow. And that makes me smile.
One of these nuggets is ‘Trailing layers’, or what I like to call ‘Intelligent Breadcrumbs’.
But what are trailing layers you ask? @sketchapp describes it thus, “If a layer is sitting within 20px of the end of a text string, it will move when you update the text value on overrides”.
That means that I can create a series of text boxes that will push & pull on each other as the text within them changes.
Yeah, yeah. So what I hear you saying. We can already just type a string of text and voila, breadcrumbs!
Yes, but the trailing layers means you can have different fonts, colours, styles, and even other objects between text layers. And as this is all kept within a tidy symbol, you can re-use it across all your designs and use the overrides to only alter the text to change. Just keep the distance between elements to 20px or less and you’re golden. Interested now?!
Download my example and see for yourself.
