In the summer of 2016 we started writing Sketch plugins to improve our efficiency when designing in Sketch. You should too.

Sketch is a great tool for designers and its plugin engine allows for the community to build features on top of it to meet our needs. We’ve been longtime fans of many Sketch plugins like Sketch Palettes, Sketch Runner, Radial Progress Bar but also integrations with other apps like Marvel and Zeplin.

Seeing the amount of plugins being made for Sketch gives you a good impression of the love people have for Sketch, but also how they enjoy building something to improve their own workflow. Or better yet, that of others.

Unlock 1: Get back free time!

As a visual designer for digital products you’re always designing against the clock. Whether it be to meet a deadline or to fight your own creative fatigue. Sketch plugins are there to keep you focused on your creative process rather than something tedious. Want to know if rounded edges look good on a radial graph? Run Radial Progress Bar. Want to quickly change the label on a dozen buttons? Run Find and Replace. Want to see how a confetti pattern looks? Run Confetti.

Thibault and Nils coding up Sketch Plugins.

Using plugins can greatly optimize your workflow thus giving you free time to get creative.

Unlock 2: Improve teamwork and stay consistent

Many plugins built for Sketch also improve your teamwork and help you stay more consistent between files. If you just spent hours to designing a gorgeous looking style kit, you want to make sure its applied to all (future) designs and everybody on your team uses the same shade of grey.

Sketch does not allow you to easily share text styles between files so we built a plugin to easily export and import your Text Styles between files. Sync the Shared Text Styles folder on Dropbox or Google Drive and you have a team that’s full in-sync with your typography kit.

Another favorite of ours is the Sketch Palettes plugin that allows you to sync your color palettes across files. Recently started syncing gradients too.

Unlock 3: Don’t think, just do

Remember when you thought you’d never use that math you did in high school? Now you know better as you use math every day in Sketch when calculating margins, grids, paddings, columns, rows, etc. Luckily we have a few plugins that make our lives easier like Dynamic Buttons, Bound with Box and Auto Layout. The built-in Make Grid is powerful too.

Using our Confetti plugin to design our Confetti plugin website 😆

Scratch your own itch

Writing our own plugins for Sketch was something that we discovered being rather fun. The collaboration between our designers and developers is great, and when a plugin is finished it becomes an immediate part of our usual workflow. Every team works differently so it’s fun to know that you can build a plugin rather quickly to tackle the hurdles of your own workflow, scratch your own itch!

If you notice yourself struggling with something often, or repeating a certain action, try and see if you can write a plugin for it!

The future of Sketch plugins is bright

The latest beta’s of Sketch reveal they’re updating their file format to be more open and transparent. This opens HUGE doors for plugin writers (like you and me 😉). A quick example by Nils Hoenson to obtain the colors used in your document:

The interesting part is that it actually works both ways so you can edit a Sketch document without opening Sketch. We can’t wait to build new stuff with the new file format.

Should designers learn to code?

A little bit, yeah. The best way to start is Sketch’s Developer website as it contains the basics you need to start writing plugins. The next step is lurking in other plugins to see how other build their plugins.

Try our Sketch plugins

We’d love to hear your experience on our latest Sketch plugins:

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