Ever since Sketch app has been released (Now in its 40.3 version), it’s been rapidly embraced by the large community of ui designers and ux designers all over the world. It’s brilliant concept created a better alternative for tools that were never really dedicated to handle such tasks of designing for screens. In the days before that, the good old Macromedia Fireworks which later on acquired by Adobe and became one of the Creative Suite products was our best choice and provided some of the best features that were really ahead of their time. But then Adobe has decided to kill this product, creating a void without providing a decent replacement.
The awesome guys at Bohemian Coding jumped on the opportunity to provide such a needed tool, and so the Sketch App was born. Although the tools in Sketch are very productive and saves a lot of time, we designers can be very spoiled and demand even more. To answers those needs, Sketch was built with the option to be extended with plugins created by the large and growing community of ui ux designers and even developers that use Sketch. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of plugins to choose from, and more and more are keep coming. Which makes it really hard to choose the best ones. So I’ve decided to share some of the best plugins that I use on daily basis and help me be more productive and focus on some of the real and important tasks of design such as problem solving. And here they are:
1. Sketch Toolbox
Sketch Toolbox is essentially a plugin manager that make it really easy to search and install plugins for Sketch. If you ever used Sublime or Atom package installer before, the concept is quite similar, and you should know how handy this feature can be.
2. Align Text Baseline for Sketch
Sketch is a wonderful tool, but there is one area in which the app still need some improvements, and it is in its typography feature. Establishing a typographic rhythm can be crucial to a great design, and unfortunately there is no way to align text properly in Sketch. However Align Text Baseline help solve this by giving you the option to align two or more selected text into each other.
3. Content Generator
Content is king, so they say, but as you probably know, content is not always available ahead of the design process. While lorem ipsum can do the trick of filling this missing gap, sometime we need to test our design solution through a more realistic content. Instead of spending time coming up with imaginary names or looking online for random image placeholders, Content Generator can do that quickly for us, and quite efficiently by randomly generating different content for multi selected items.
4. Dynamic Buttons
One of the most important things in a good user interface design is the ability to stay consistent and to rely on design systems and design patterns. Dynamic Button is an awesome little plugin that saves a lot of time by making sure that the padding around text in a button are fixed and consistent no matter how long the text is. You simply select the text, run the plugin and by magic it turn into a button. But the really cool feature is that you are able to update this text, and the padding will remain the same and expand the button to fit its new dimensions.
5. Sketch Measure
Red lines can be a tedious and unproductive task for any designer. If you want to save yourself same valuable time, and automate the process of creating those, you will love Sketch Measure. This plugin is packed with so many features despite the fact that it’s totally free which make it even more awesome.
6. Sketch Distributor
Before I moved to mainly use Sketch for my user interface and user experience design, I’ve used to work on with Adobe Illustrator, and one of my favorite features in Illustrator was the ability to evenly distribute elements providing a fixed value. That’s why I was so pleased to find Sketch Distributor which does exactly what its name implies.
7. Sketch-iconfont
Another great feature that I always liked in Adobe’s products is the option to open the glyphs window which make the process of selecting icons from a set of a font-icon really quick. Sketch Iconfont do the exact same thing. The plugin also make it easy to install new sets from a bundle or svg files. One cool bundle can be found here, and its including some of the most popular font-icon set such as font awesome and the material icon set.
8. Sketch Constraints
We all know by now how mobile usage has been massively growing and how crucial it is for businesses to include support for it in their strategy to maximize engagement with their users. Rather if it’s a responsive layout or a dedicated mobile site, as designers we need to make sure that the experience is optimized and consistent across omni channels. While Sketch make it easy to work on a few artboards at the same time, making sure that alignment and spacing is consistent can become a tedious task. Sketch Constraints take care of this by defining a fixed set of constraints that applied to specific layer and its relative to the parent group or artboard.
9. Sketch Palettes
Sketch Palettes is a great tool that adds the option to export and reload the color palettes in Sketch. You can then share colors between projects or with your team members.
10. Magic Mirror
When presenting works to clients, we sometimes need to show them the context of our design and how it will look like on real devices before any production starts. While still like to use Photoshop to mockup this cases, Magic Mirror is a very nice alternative to do the same thing within the Sketch environment.
11. Find and Replace
We all been there. Just before we about to present our works, the client send a request to change the wording here and there. An if that change need to be applied across all screens, it can become a real time wasting task. Find and Replace does exactly what its name says. Finding this specific words or texts that need to be replaced, and replacing them with the new ones you type in.
12. Sort Me
Projects in Sketch can get really large, and that could mean a humongous list of layers or artboards. Sort Me helps sorting all these by alphabetically or numerically.
13. Marketch
Marketch is very similar to the popular app Zeplin and help close the gap between designers and developers by automatically generating red lines and css attributes from any Sketch file. The issue with Zeplin though is that users have to create an account in order to view the details on a cloud account. Marketch instead generate an html file that could be easily shared with developers who can easily pull all the needed details.
There you have it. Hope this list of awesome plugins can be helpful and productive to you as much as it is to me. This is list is not absolute and based on my personal opinion though, so feel free to suggest some more awesome plugins you know of in the comments section below.
And one more thing, while all of the plugins in this list are free of charge and created by some brilliant guys, please help support this awesome community who keeps providing us these great features by donating as much as you can. You can find the details for how to do that in provided link.
