Optimizing your Sketch symbol override

Sketch’s symbols has been a great help for us designers in creating different digital products, from brochure kind of websites, to mobile apps, and even to big scale web apps. But as the number of symbols increases, the more overwhelming it becomes just like the one below:

list of icons you can use for overrides

You get to be bombarded with a whole list of your symbols that you have to scan through so that you may find what you need.

And for this post, I made two kinds of buttons as our samples (see above) with the following rules:

1. Primary button (light blue) will use icons with circle container
2. Secondary button (dark blue) will use default icons — icons w/out circle container

Having this kind of override list can be a pain in the neck in the long run.This kind of overrides gears towards to having a too dynamic design system which can allow designers to override elements and overlook the rules (see sample below):

using default icons for primary buttons, and circle icons for secondary buttons

This kind of override allowed me to apply wrong icons in both primary and secondary buttons. Thus, with this nuisance I found as I create symbols one after the other, I discovered a great way to populate the override list with the right elements, that creates a more systematized and stricter implementation of your design rules which is….. (drum roll please 🥁) Artboard sizes 😉

Artboard resize

From the video above what I did was,

1. Since I have two kinds of icons (circle and default), I resized the artboards of my circled icons into 32x32px and retained the default ones to 48x48px. This will make Sketch, group the circled icons as one, and group together the default icons as another.
2. Once you are done, you can go back to your instance, and you will now have an override list with the right elements as shown in the video above.

Note: This approach works well in nested symbols, and always make sure that your parent symbol’s initial design (without overrides) is using the right elements, just like how I did in my primary and secondary button examples.

Sketch’s feature of symbol override has really brushed off the pain in me every time I design, but as you learn to create a design system, seeing a whole list of populated symbols which is not part of the system creates an eyesore for me and for us designers. Thus, discovering this and learning how Sketch categorizes symbols, and how I can have the right population in my override list helped me a lot more.

I hope this new Sketch trick will make your work more efficient and have it applied into your next design project :)

Also adding here a helpful article about buttons — https://medium.com/ux-power-tools/a-better-way-to-make-buttons-in-sketch-6c23470f27c by Jon Moore

For questions you can say hi at mhariellmosqueriola@gmail.com or follow me at behance, behane.net/mhariellriel