Sketch Measure: A thorough walkthrough

You should make this plugin as a part of your workflow, if you still haven’t this is the guide for you

There are bunch of plugins coming up all the time for Sketch. You can check this list out to see whichever suits you the best. For me I have few plugins without which I really cannot breathe. Sketch Measure is one of it.

You can download Sketch Measure from here. Just follow the instructions mentioned over there to set up the plug-in. It’s not too complicated.

To confirm the plugin is installed just go to your plugins menu and it will show up over there like this:

Ok, now let’s go through each of the options that Sketch Measure provides. In total, there are 7.

1. Sizes
2. Margin or Padding
3. Distances
4. Properties
5. Coordinates
6. Settings
7. Lite

Before we dive into these menu’s, I’ve made a sketch file for you guys to refer. You can download it here. You might run into a problem of not having the font with you, but you can always go ahead and replace it with whatever you want them to be.

1. Sizes

It is used to measure the size of an element. You select the particular layer, run the ‘Sizes’ options and you get what you’ve asked for. Check below to see how it works:

You just select any element. Go to sketch-measure-master > 1. Sizes. Here you can select if you want just the widhth or just the height. You can also decide on which side of the box you want the values to appear. There’s a check box at the bottom. Below you will see the dimensions shown for the ‘Container’ layer:

2. MarginOrPadding

It is used to measure padding or the margin of the element from its respective container. You will see the following popup every time you run it. You have checkboxes in there so you can choose where all you want to measure your margins and paddings.

The way it works is first you select the element/layer and then run the plugin. It will automatically show margins like this:

Why just margin? Because I only selected the ‘body’ text. If you want to see the padding, you just select the ‘body’ text and the ‘container’ layer and run the plugin. Here’s what you will see:

3. Distances

For this, you have to select two layers. Distances does what it says, calculates distance from layer A to layer B, quite handy.

4. Properties

Take a look at what properties have to offer:

When you select a layer and run properties, you get a bunch of options. You tick what properties you want to show for that particular layer. The good thing about this is that if say one of the property doesn’t apply to a particular layer, it won’t show up. There’s also a show position dropdown. You can select which side of the element you want to show your properties. Here’s an example:

So I have applied these checkboxes. Depending on what layer I have selected, I will get different results. Check the image below.

5. Coordinates

The name speaks for itself. Coordinates gives you the position of the element/layer based on where it is located in the artboard. Basically its X and Y position.

Below you can see the position of the container layer in the artboard is 150px on X and 54px on Y.

I don’t use this one as quite much but it can be helpful.

6. Settings

I barely touch settings. But let’s take a look at it. It would be a good learning for me as well. Settings has 4 options inside; like:

1. Toggle All Measure Hidden: To hide all the active measures in your document.
2. Clear All Measure: To delete all the measures in your document
3. Design Resolution: To set resolution in which you’re designing.

4. Guide Style: To customise how your guides/measures look. You can fiddle around with these to get your desired style.

7. Lite

I’m still not sure about this. Everytime I try to use it, it makes my layers disappear for some strange reason. If you know any workaround for this, please let me know.

In the end this is how my document looks like with all the redlines.

Sketch Measure has some weird keyboard shortcuts, to which I am very used to now. But if you ever want to change it or customise it for your own needs, I suggest you go through this tutorial I wrote about how to do that. Check it out here.

As usual if you thought this article was useful to you or errors, I’d absolutely love to hear back from you on twitter.

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