Sketch 3 Tutorial — Designing Google Sheets Icon
We are often overly impressed by the final design of an app or icon and that’s the exact response the designers are looking for. While that can work for consumers, it can make approaching design as a creator a fairly intimidating task.
In this series of articles, I’m going to deconstruct a handful of designs we see everyday and attempt re-build them from scratch. Last week, we learned how to design the Google Docs’ Icon. Continuing on that theme, we’ll be spending the next 10 minutes, designing the Google Sheets’ Icon.
Be sure to watch the video tutorial on Youtube.
Let Start
Step 1 — Create the background
Create a simple rectangle using by pressing the “R” key on your keyboard. Create a rectangle 107px width and 136px height. You can fine tune the size in the Inspector Panel on the right hand side.
Moving a little further down in the inspector panel, find the “Borders”toggle and turn that off.
Tip: By default, all the shapes created inside Sketch will have a grey border applied to them. To save time and avoid performing repetitive tasks we can change that default for this project.
Make sure your rectangle is selected. Click on the Edit menu and select Set Style as Default from the dropdown.
All future items will be created with a grey background and no border.
Find the “Fills” option, located directly above Borders. Click he color picker and change the hex value to #00A456.
If you haven’t already, go ahead and select your Rectangle layer in the “Layers Panel” on the left hand side. Double click the layer in panel and rename it to Background.
It’s important to stay organised as the complexity of your projects grow.
Step 2— Create fold and drop shadow
Start by selecting the “Triangle” shape from the “Insert” menu on the top left of Sketch.
Click and drag until you have a 24px by 24px triangle. Note that there is no border around your newly created shape. Of course, you can always change that for future projects, but we’re good for now.
Go ahead change the fill hex color to #73CDA2.
This is not the most sustainable approach for this design, but we’ll discuss a better way to tackle this step and try to mainstream the process.
Select your newly created triangle in the “Layers Panel” on the left and rename it to Fold.
In the “Layers Panel” select the Background and Fold layer at the same time. You can accomplish this by holding down the Command key as you select the different layers.
We want to make sure the Fold layer and the Background layer are perfectly aligned. So with both layers selected, we’ll go to the “Inspector Panel” on the right and at the top, we’ll use the “Align Right” and the “Align Top” options to align our layers.
Go back to the “Layers Panel” on the left and select ONLY the Fold layer.
Press the Return key on your keyboard to enter the vector mode. This is what it’ll look like.
We’re going to drag and drop the top point until it’s parallel with the bottom left vector point. Something like this.
Press Return/Enter to finish editing vector points.
Have a quick look at the Inspector Panel on the right, and make sure your height is still 24px. It is possible to move your point higher or lower and that’ll affect your height.
Go ahead and click the lock icon between the width and height to constraint the values.
Select the “Fold” layer and duplicate it using the keyboard shortcut and make sure you rename it to Drop Shadow. *Important to keep a clean workspace.*
Nudge in down, so it’s positioned perfectly underneath the Fold layer.
Flip it horizontally and vertically using the buttons in the Inspector Panel.
This is what you should be looking at
As before, Using the “Fills” option, change the hex value to #006A37.
This is what you should be looking at
Last week, we created the fold effect, relying on the accuracy of our eyes. This week, we’re going to take a slightly different approach to make sure our design is as pixel perfect as we can get it.
It’s still the same approach, but we’re going to use Sketch’s built in calculator to move our vector points. Let’s check it out.
Step 3— Make the Fold
With the Background layer selected, hit enter on your keyboard to enter vector mode.
Click anywhere along the right side of the Background layer to create a new vector point.
Go ahead and change it a Straight point. Just like this
Drag the newly created vector point and drag it to the very top right corner of our Background layer.
Notice the X and Y position on the right.
We know the Fold layer is 24px in width and height, so here’s what we’re going to do.
With the vector point still selected, click inside the Y Axis box and create a simple mathematical operation to add 24px to your current value.
Press Enter. This will move your vector point to the bottom right corner of the Fold layer.
With the background layer still in vector mode, select the top right vector point, and move it 24px to the left.
Press Enter and voila. Here’s what you should be looking at.
This is a preferable way of designing our corners, because it leaves less room for human error. Computers are good at calculating and they quite enjoy it, so let them do their job and you can focus on designing cool stuff.
Step 4— Create the Sheets
This is going to be straight forward and you should be able to create this on your own. Think of it as your homework. (hint: rectangles and lines)
If you’re not sure how to do that, you can watch the video on Youtube and follow along for this step.
Step 5— Bulletproof your design
As a closing point, I would like to draw your attention to a major design flaw in our project. You may be familiar with the concept of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). This applies mainly to coding, but I don’t see what we can’t use it in design.
Try this.
Select your Background and change the Fill color to anything you want. Here’s what I’ve chosen.
Looks kinda silly, doesn’t it. Now we need to go and change the colors of our Fold and Drop Shadow layers. There is a better way to mainstream our process.
We are going to make a few simple changes to our design to allow the background color to show through the Fold and Drop Shadow layers.
Select the Fold layer and change it’s Fill color to #FFFFFF.
Select the Drop Shadow layer and change it’s Fill color to #000000.
Here’s what you should be looking at.
It’s looking pretty crappy, so let’s fix it.
Select both the Fold and Drop Shadow layer and in the Inspector Panel change the opacity to 50%.
Looking much better.
And the colors change automatically as we change the background color.
Let’s complete our design and add our sheets icon.
That’s a wrap. If you missed anything along the way, you can watch the Youtube video and follow along step by step.
Next week, we’ll learn how to design the Google Slides icon. We’ll use everything we’ve learned, while learning new techniques to better our design process.
See you other end.
