Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Caio Calderari

A simple analysis of sketch features I would love existed right now, but unfortunately they don’t. Please sketch team! Do it soon ?

We love Sketch ? I get it. I’m loving it too. This tool rocks ?
I know, nothing is always perfect, we are humans, never satisfied, but it’s ok. Truth is, although we love Sketch, there are a few things missing on the tool right now and I’m sure you might already felt that sometimes. I think we would love it even more if they were there already.

For sketch to get there I think is just a matter of time, well, let’s help them by sharing the most wanted new features we would love it to have.

Here’s just my humble view of what is missing in sketch right now:

#1 — Symbols as mask for other symbols

Have you ever wondered why this isn’t possible? Me too. How about we could do that? Imagine the possibilities. Crazy stuff could be done. ?‍ Imagine the coolness of being able to mask a button shape with a custom color symbol you can change and then get different styles of this button with the same color that is automatically updated when you change it just in one click? Please Sketch do it soon! ?

Without a symbol mask you need to change your button base format everywhere. That’s not cool!An example of how a symbol mask would help if it was possible. You could change the base shape of a button everywhere in seconds.

#2- Independent Text Style Settings

You create a text style and share it across your layouts, but somewhere a H1 Style is aligned left and elsewhere the same H1 needs to be aligned centered. When you do it sketch will ask you to update your text style, but then, you will lose your left alignment, but you don’t want it and you don’t want to create two text styles for the same H1. To solve that issue you will need to create a text style for H1 Left, H1 Centered and so on… ?

Why can’t we just create a new text style and check/select what are the options we want to include to that text style. Ex: If I just want it to give me the font style and color it’s fine, just check both. Or just the font style not the color or the font the color and the alignment, etc… Just check what you will need to add to that text style and the rest will get the style of what is already in the element by default. Something like CSS ideia of sharing styles?

Endless fight! ?

Have you ever thought about it? Share your ideias!

#3- Sync symbol elements

Imagine you could sync some of the elements inside of a symbol. Right now if you have a symbol with a light color and you need to add it on a light background you need to have two symbols with different colors to be able to change it according to your needs (black/white), but let’s say you have two identical symbols just to cover black and white usages but you need to change something inside them, you will need to do it twice or even more times depending on how many variations you have created.

What if you could sync similar symbol features as, position, colors, etc, and when something happens in one symbol the others get the same changes applied too? Even if you need variations they are like part of the same base, so they will have their own particularities but sharing the same base ideia where one is identical to others and each could have it’s own styles on top of that, and you could check what is global/base and what is just for that particular symbol. Again, some sort of CSS mindset for symbols. Got it? ✌️

Just a quick example of how this feature could be useful.

#4- Add symbols as fill of a text style

Crazy? Maybe, but might be useful. Instead of setting colors for each text style you have if you had a symbol with a color that is your primary as a fill color of all your similar text styles all you needed to do is to change one symbol and everything would be updated. It’s something similar to this idea of Francesco Bertocci but as a native sketch feature and not a hack: http://ift.tt/2lkixXl — This is a cool hack though, unfortunately won’t work with dark backgrounds.

☕ These are the main stuff that I feel need in sketch right now, but of course you guys might have other ideas, why not sharing it so we can make Sketch better, maybe they can use our ideas as source of inspiration for next features! ⚒

Want to learn some cool sketch stuff?
Check Jon Moore posts and also Francesco Bertocci, Lloyd Humphreys, Anima App they talk about great sketch stuff. Totally recommended. ?

Check also this post http://ift.tt/2oclQnN
They talk about some Sketch Issues and also how to solve them! Very cool!

What else is missing for you? Share your thoughts! ✍?

PS: I haven’t tested new 4.3 version yet!

❤️

<a href="http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK">http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK</a>

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Sketch missing features overview from a designer perspective 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.

Sketch missing features overview from a designer perspective

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