Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Spasimir Dinev One frame to rule them all.

The problem:

Resizing a frame will squash the sides.

It so happens you want to use a lovely frame for a bunch of images. You already found an image of a vertically oriented photo frame, but, darn, no two photos of yours have the same ratio (some are square, some — horizontal). When you try to resize a photo, you squish and squeeze the sides.

Now, Sketch 43 and the Auto-Layout plugin are here to the rescue. Following is a detailed tutorial on how to make a photo frame behave responsively. If you don’t want to follow steps, you can download the file as well (link at the bottom of the article).

Slice and dice

Step 1 — Load up the frame you’ll want to use. Zoom in to one of the corners (if your frame has a shadow, opt for that one). Create a square, making sure don’t cover anything within the frame (where the image will be placed), and make sure you cover any shadow you have.

The first square is important, because everything else will be based on its size.

Step 2 — Repeat the procedure for all corners. Go for the sides as well. Make sure the rectangles touch, but never overlap.

Step 3 — Duplicate (option+mouse drag) the image of the frame, so there are as many copies as there are rectangles (to be precise — 8)

tip: Convert the image to a symbol beforehand to keep the filesize lower.

Step 4 — Group, Mask, Rename:

Select one image and one rectangle, group them together (cmd+g). You need them in separate groups to be able to mask each image separately.
Right-click on the rectangle (make sure it’s the bottom layer) and select “Mask”.
Rename the group to reflect the position of the rectangle in the frame. This has no effect on the end result, but it’s best practice to name your layers (you can rename your rectangles as well).
Repeat for all groups

Step 5 — Symbolism: Convert each folder to a symbol (they will be automatically named by the name of the group). Then, select all symbols and convert them to a symbol. I called my new Symbol Frame.

Convert each group to a symbolSelect all new symbols and make a new symbol out of them.

Step 6 — Gray stuff, go away! Go to each group in the symbols and remove the fill and border of each mask.

Remove the border and fill from each mask. Bring transparency back!

Congratulations. Visually speaking, you’re exactly where you started from. Now, let’s make this responsive.

Corners, Responsify!

Now comes the time when the Auto-Layout plugin shines (Sketch 44 will not need the plugin, but at the time of writing it’s just released as a beta). You can download it at http://ift.tt/2cebuy2 if you don’t already have it. They have recently expanded the plugin to include Launchpad (to publish websites directly from Sketch), but we won’t go into that for this tutorial. You can check a quick video tutorial by Pablo Stanley, but it won’t be necessary for our purposes.

Go to your “frame” symbol. Open up the Auto-Layout panel (if it’s not open yet. It appears on the bottom right side of Sketch)

Step 1 — Sides — select one of the “sides” (left, right, top, bottom parts of the frame). “Pin” each to three corners: for example: top side — pin it to top, right and left. This way, when stretched, the top side will stretch horizontally, and will stick to he top.

Pin top side to top, left, and right.

Step 2 — Corners — select a “corner” piece. For example: top right. Pin it to top and right, so it will always stay in the top right corner when you resize.

Pin the top right symbol to top and left.

Repeat for all sides and corners.

Step 3 — Select all sides and corners, and under the “Resizing” option, change to “Pin to corner”.

Lovely. Now everything should work just fine. Go back to your design and give it a try — resize the frame without squishing pixels.

Bonus: Add a photo template

In your “frame” symbol, create a rectangle that fills the inner space of the frame. Make sure you don’t leave empty pixels between the frame and the rectangle.
In Auto Layout plugin: “pin” to all sides, so it will always resize to fill the whole frame.
Remove the default border, and change the fill to “image”.
I changed the image (for better preview purposes), but you don’t need to for this to work.
Set the mode from the default “tile” to “fill”
In your design, you can now override the instance of the “frame” symbol with a new image. When you resize, the frame will stay proper, and the image will always try to “fill” the space. Lovely.

Wow!

Thanks for reading this far. Now you can create a whole gallery in no time! Vertically, horizontally oriented images or squares, nothing will mess with your frame.

You can download the Sketch file I created HERE.

Create a resizable image frame with Sketch 43 and Auto-Layout was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Create a resizable image frame with Sketch 43 and Auto-Layout

Cool stuff, every week

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