Top 5 Sketch Plugins for 2017
I have to admit; I am a long-time Photoshop user. It’s a powerful tool that hasn’t quite managed to surpass its focus on image editing, while still maintaining a firm posture as a multi-purpose design tool. But there are always drawbacks to taking such a broad approach. Generations of Photoshop users have noted its complex, sprawling user interface which can take years to master.
Sketch quickly rose to my favorite design application surpassing the Adobe Suite after nearly 20 years of using their products. Sure, the first few versions of Sketch were glitchy and crashed frequently but those days are over!
The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity.- Jon Bolt
I feel Sketch allows me to work more effectively and makes some of the tedious tasks (generating content, redlines, style guides, etc) a thing of the past with the help of some amazing plugins for Sketch. In my opinion, the community support for Sketch has help propel it past Photoshop, Illustrator, and definitely XD which seems to be a direct response to Sketch.
So now, a couple years in and several hundred of artboards created, I would like to present to you the plugins I feel every designer should consider. It’s hilarious that the design community is giving such a big round-of-applause for the new artboards in Photoshop. While the Adobe team is working on features that Sketch already has, the Sketch community is working on an amazing plug-ins to combine real live data and integrate code into Sketch.
Anyways, without further ado i present to you my top five list of favorite Sketch Plugins!
1. Content Generator Plugin
Content Generator is by far the most useful plugin I’ve found when it comes to prototyping and dummy data generation. It saves you an enormous amount of time and it’s super easy to use.
It can generate almost any type of dummy data you may need from avatars, names and plain text content. Just select the layer you want filled with dummy data, select the type of data you want from the plugin dropdown menu and “Bam!”, there you have it. Content generator allows you quickly create dummy data such as avatars, names, geo location data etc.
2. Dynamic Button Plugin
Let’s face it, one of the big downsides of current design applications like Photoshop is that they are not natively responsive, they don’t adapt. When you develop a button in CSS, the shape of the labeling text automatically adapts so it keeps the padding you defined in the properties without any extra effort.
Dynamic Button Plugin does exactly same thing as you would in CSS. It allows buttons to automatically expand based on the text they contain with a preset padding. Dynamic Buttons is a great tool when you are building big, complex UI designs, as it saves lots of time and spares you frustration. Dynamic Button Plugin allows to create buttons with fixed paddings no matter what text you add.
3. Style Inventory Plugin
Design requires free, sometimes chaotic exploration. But design also means organization and structure. Sketch can be good in both aspects, but moving from exploration to structured layouts with text styles and unified colors is hard. Either you start clean files from scratch, or you use what you have and try to tidy it up. The Style Inventory is meant to help you with that. It gives you an overview of all your used styles and helps you to merge styles of similar layers into one.
Style Inventory brings structure to the chaotic nature of design. It’s probably the Sketch plugin with the most features but it’s still pretty easy to start using quickly.
Using Style Inventory you may easily select layers by color, name and style. It also has the impressive feature of easily being able to create a style guide by generating artboards of all referenced text styles and colors in any given Sketch design.
4. CSSketch Plugin
CSSketch is plugin that enables you to modify your designs quickly by attaching it a stylesheet to it that you can use to lay out your designs, change colors and shadows quickly, etc. It supports Sass and {less} stylesheets, which means you can put functions and variables in your stylesheet to make your workflow even more efficient.
This plugin allows you to write CSS which directly affects the elements in your Sketch document. Its fairly straightforward and will save a ton of time when working out your design.
5. Marvel Plugin
The Marvel Plugin will allow you to quickly create prototypes from your designs by sending your Sketch artboards directly to Marvel. Marvel gets kudos when it comes to keeping everything simple in regards to use and interface. Subsequently some users may not be into the simplicity finding it too simple compared to other prototype editors along with the free account limitations.
With Marvel Prototyping, you can use Marvel to directly create screens. If you don’t want to do it directly in Marvel, you can add in images you already have in Sketch. To make this even easier, you could just connect to your cloud storage and have all of your screens at your fingertips. Marvel Prototyping makes editing easier. They have a simple editor which lets you link all of your designs together, then allows you to input gestures and different transitions to make your prototypes feel exactly as if they were already a real website or app. Marvel Prototyping also allows you to collaborate with whoever you are working with. You can share what you are working in and receive real-time feedback so you know if you are moving in the right direction.
