Sketch 2022: A review of our favorite new design features so far this year
We sure love all the updates in the first three months from our favorite design tool — Sketch and we can’t wait to see what all of 2022 is going to bring!
There have been a lot of great releases and polishes this year already that are making a big difference in our team’s day-to-day work. And we think you may like them as well. We’ve been Sketch fans since the very early days and love curating all things Sketch. So, welcome to our newest edition 😊
Hot off the press: Sketch 85
There are some sweet upgrades and polishes in the latest new version that came out this week.
🌟 New Project Permissions — We love being able to choose who sees our design projects while they are still work in progress. Choosing between our whole Workspace or just the members we invite is quite empowering for us designers, especially when we’re feeling shy 🙃 Read more about how to use this feature in the docs.
🤩 New Faces — The data source now includes some new faces to elevate your designs with beautiful personas for your design mockups and prototypes.
Our top favorite new features in 2022— we think you’ll enjoy them as well!
Adding a description to highlight updates to design documents
We love using Stars to mark the importance of components in our documents for our team members to see. And now Sketch has made it possible for us to add a description to each document’s timeline in the web app. This is a great new way to let our team members know what is important and new in our design updates to a document right there in Sketch. It’s really helped with being efficient and being able to communicate async with each other across different timezones.
Components Web View — a powerful tool for our design docs
We truly love this new feature that came in Sketch 82. Components Web View is a powerful way to view all of our Symbols, Color Variables, Layer Styles, and Text Styles. It has boosted our design process as it makes it so much easier to search and understand all the parts in our documents and Libraries, with an easy-to-use menu on the left that provides more details for each component. Check out Sketch’s new docs to learn more about how to use this feature to your benefit.
Color Tokens — bringing Color Variables to our dev projects
Color Tokens is something we got really excited about in our team as we work closely with developers on many of our projects and this brought a significant upgrade to our developer handoff process. To sum it up, our dev team’s eyes widened 😍 when we showed them this new feature!
With Color Tokens you can export, integrate and sync Color Variables from your designs to your development projects. If you’ve got a document or Library with Color Variables, you can now use the web app to download Color Tokens in CSS or JSON formats, or generate a URL that stays up to date with any changes you make. — Sketch
Sketch has a pretty great blog post that explains Color Tokens in detail with videos. Check it out, here.
Upgraded Font Embedding — having our fonts at our fingertips
Embedding fonts in Workspace documents has gotten much easier this year. When you save a document to a Workspace for the first time, or after adding new custom fonts, you can quickly select which fonts you want to embed — or all at once — with a single click. Even better, the app remembers your choice for each Workspace, so you don’t have to do this for every new document. This is a really a sweet upgrade 🍻
Corner Controls and Styles
Sketch introduced new Corner Styles: in addition to Rounded and Smooth, you can now use the Angled, Inside Square, and Inside Arc styles. It’s great as we can now use them on triangles, stars, polygons, and closed paths directly.
You can now adjust the corner radius of rectangles on the Canvas: drag a corner handle to control all corners with the same size, hold ⌘ to control a single corner, or ⌥ to control all corners at once. Sketch has also added four individual input fields in the Inspector for each corner in the rectangle.
To learn more about the new and improved Corners, check out this blog post.
Recent Prototyping improvements we love
✨ When you grab and drag prototyping interactions on the Canvas, you’ll now only select interactions with the same destination Artboard, even if you have selected multiple layers.
🖇️ You can now override any prototype interaction in a Symbol instance. Previously this was only possible with Hotspots, but Sketch has opened that up for Links as well.
⛓️ Sketch improved the visibility of prototype links. Now, you can either choose to see all links for a prototype or only those related to the selected layer(s) from the View menu.
✔️ Sketch has added an extra option for Hotspot layers to the View menu. Now you can choose to either show or hide Hotspots.
🌀 You can now set Artboards as click targets in a prototype. This way, you don‘t have to add hotspot layers anymore when you just want to show a simple flow or presentation.
🙏 You can now change prototyping targets directly in the Canvas by dragging the link arrow to the Artboard you want.
To learn more about Prototyping in Sketch, make sure to check out their handy documentation and tutorial.
And some of our fave new polishes…
🔥 When creating exportable layers or slices with prefixes, Sketch has now given us more control over the prefix’s placement in the file name if the layer name contains a slash (/). With the new Primary Prefix option, the prefix will appear in front of the full path instead of the last path component only. Yep, it’s very handy!
🚮 We can now send Workspace documents and projects we no longer need to Trash right from the Workspace window. We all know that we have way too many drafts, we no longer need 😉
✨ In Recent documents in Workspaces we can now search for a document by the author. This is nice to have for bigger teams working across many projects.
😊 Sketch has optimized the way fonts are embedded when exporting Artboards to PDF so the size of our exported PDF is smaller.
❣️ Sketch recently launched a brand new Newsletter called Beyond the Canvas. It’s once a month and we know it will be one of the few emails we get and open with excitement. 😎 Their talented team members curate insightful design industry content and resources to help us learn and take our skills to the next level.
… and finally a little note to the team creating Sketch 🧡 💛
Thank you team Sketch for making an incredible macOS tool and web app for the design and creatives community around the world that allows us to turn our ideas into great designs and products that we pour our love into. We see your hard work and we appreciate you tremendously!
— The Sketch App Sources Team and Community
P.s. if you have not tried Sketch yet, we think you’ll enjoy checking out their free trial and getting started guide.
