Digital product design is one space where things never move slowly. The development of new tools to get our work done faster is cranking at record pace, which makes it difficult at times to keep up with all the latest and greatest Sketch goodies.
Let’s take a look at 3 awesome new Sketch plugins that drastically improve your digital product design workflow.
Chain
You likely never knew you wanted a tool like Chain… until you’ve used it. If you’ve worked with Shared Styles in Sketch, then you may have found that slight variations in color density, opacity, or even hue require you to create and update a multitude of styles.
Using Chain, you can establish a link between the color of layers, but instead of sharing the exact same colors, they share a relationship with a “reference” object that you choose. This means you can have a set of buttons of a particular color, then chain them to a “hover” state set at -20 brightness, and a disabled state set at -80 saturation. Now if you update the color of the primary buttons, you can simply update the chain with 1 click to update all 3 sets of buttons.
This is a huge timesaver for large, cumbersome design systems in transition.
Keys for Sketch
As with many applications, Sketch hasa ton of great shortcuts to remove friction from your workflow, but not every single menu item has a shortcut of its own. Enter Sketch Keys (keyboard pun!). Sketch Keys allows us to customize and create custom keyboard shortcuts from directly within the Sketch application preferences. No more dipping into the system preferences and typing out menu item names in hopes that they’ll work.
Sketch Keys even recognizes menu items associated with plugins like Craft, so now you can set your own shortcut to launch a selected artboard into Freehand to start collaborating around a design idea instantly.
Icondrop
Not a day goes by that I don’t open my web browser and go scavenging for icons. Now, the folks at iconscout have created a very handy plugin called icondrop to browse their library from directly within Sketch. The library includes both free and premium icons that pop onto your canvas with a single click. If you’re making an effort to be frugal, I recommend clicking the free tab, then Select Style, and then chose Pixel Perfect. Who doesn’t love free icons?
What are you designing with Sketch? Tell us on Twitter: @InVisionApp.
Looking for more Sketch tutorials?
A quick tip for keeping shared styles consistent in Sketch
How to override colors in Sketch
Creating infinitely scalable connection arrows in Sketch
Video Producer at InVision, former UI/UX designer of international in-flight entertainment, and avid automotive enthusiast.
