Sketch has become a core tool for User Interface (UI) Design. This is down to its simplicity and range of functionality. Some of this functionality can be greatly extended to improve a designer’s workflow thanks to the countless number of third-party plugins that are available to be installed. In this blog post we will take you through our top five most useful Sketch plugins that we at Graphic Mint use in our day-to-day Design within the Sketch app.
1. Sketch Spellcheck All Layers
Out of all of the available Sketch plugins, this comes out on top. When designing UI elements it can become pretty easy to overlook spelling mistakes. These mistakes can reflect poorly on the quality of the work. By itself Sketch lacks a built-in spell checker to catch mistakes in real-time. This plugin can save so much embarrassment and time as spelling mistakes are often what people notice first when reviewing your Designs, rather than the actual Designs.
2. Sketch Split Shape
Our second favourite Sketch plugin allows shapes to be split evenly into smaller shapes. It does it by defining the required number of columns, rows, margin and gutter spaces. Sketch Split Shape can save you a lot of time by calculating how to evenly split shapes into smaller shapes. This is why it is one of our favourite Sketch plugins.
3. Content Generator for Sketch
The third Sketch plugin we recommend allows realistic dummy content to be quickly inserted into a Design. Content Generator for Sketch can insert a lot of realistic content:
- Images from Flickr or Instagram
- Geo locations
- Persona names
- Persona photos
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Lorem ipsum text
- And a lot more
This is highly useful if you want to quickly fill your UI Designs with data. No more time wasted on Google looking for stock photography or trying to come up with dummy phone numbers, names or email addresses.
4. Craft by InVision
If you are using InVision for your prototyping needs, then this Sketch plugin is essential. At the time of writing Sketch has introduced its own prototyping capabilities. Currently, these still seem a little behind InVision’s level of offered functionality. Nevertheless, Craft by InVision allows Sketch artboards to be directly uploaded to InVision, as well as allowing updates made to artboards to be synced to InVision.
A must-have if you are using Sketch and InVision in tandem. This plugin features some extra functionality such as easy duplication, a cloud library for design assets, freehand annotation of artboards with multiple people and a data generator.
5. Sketch Material
The final Sketch plugin we recommend is Sketch Material. It offers all the components defined by Google as part of their Material Design language. Such components include buttons, menus, forms, dialogs, chips, snackbars, tables and tooltips. While this plugin is highly useful if you are following Material Design guidelines, it also offers quick access to icons, colour palettes and shadows. These can be used across any project regardless of adhering to Material Design.
Other Sketch Plugins Worth Considering
While we have only discussed five here in detail, there are some Sketch plugins that are worthy runner-ups and deserve a mention.
Sketch Measure – This provides simple spec export for developers.
Looper – This allows quick patterns to be created out of shapes.
Magic Mirror 3 – This allows the ability to rotate objects in a 3-dimensional plain.
So there you have it, some of the most useful Sketch plugins that we use here at Graphic Mint. We understand that many designers have different workflows and approaches to best suit their needs, so there can be a variety of different plugins which work best for other people.
Follow us on Twitter and tweet us your recommendations of any plugins that are highly useful to you that we forgot to mention.
At Graphic Mint we can help you with the Design of your next UI, following best practice and standards. Why not contact us today to start our journey together?
