8 critical shortcuts in Sketch
Want to work smarter and faster than everyone else? You’re in luck, because I’m going to show you how to master the 8 most important Sketch shortcuts. Improve your entire workflow—and your end results.
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Sketch vs. Photoshop: The 5 things Sketch can do that Photoshop can’t
Even if you haven’t made the switch yet, you’re likely aware of the mass exodus of Photoshop users switching to Sketch. So what makes Sketch the tool for designing digital products? To put it simply, Sketch can do a number of things that Photoshop can’t. And it makes sense—Photoshop wasn’t built for product design. So let’s put ’em head-to-head, Sketch vs. Photoshop. Here are our top 5 indispensable Sketch capabilities that are currently missing from Photoshop.
Grabbing lost design elements from the past in Sketch
Sketch gives us an infinitely sprawling canvas to lay out as many artboards and design elements as our hearts desire. But with that kind of freedom comes great responsibility—inevitably, something may accidentally get changed, moved, or even deleted entirely as we work. By the time we catch the problem, it’s often too late for Command Z.
What’s new with group resizing in Sketch 44
With the recent arrival of Sketch 44, there’s a lot of excitement around significant improvements to one of Sketch’s most valuable features, group resizing. The UI and nomenclature for making these decisions has changed entirely, giving us much more control. Let’s take a look at how each of the legacy resizing modes translates in this update.
iOS 10 style shadows in Sketch
With iOS 10 on the way, there are some new but subtle design tweaks worth noting. One of them is found in the Music App—a diffused drop shadow on Album Artwork that carries a soft glow of the artwork itself. Let’s take a look at how Symbols in Sketch make this effect easy to implement and repeat consistently throughout your design.
Nested symbol overrides in Sketch
Sketch 41 has arrived with a fresh new look and an incredibly useful new feature: nested symbol overrides. Let’s look at how nested symbols can be used as placeholders and swapped out on the fly within different instances of a parent symbol.
Creating infinitely scalable connection arrows in Sketch
When wireframing your next big idea in Sketch, you may find yourself creating arrows on your canvas to show how screens might flow. It’s all fun and games until you need to scale or stretch one of your arrows and you find yourself with a distorted mess. In the video tutorial above, you’ll learn a simple method for creating connection arrows that are infinitely scalable and reusable—with zero distortion.
Quick tips for creating flexible forms in Sketch
Designing forms can be a real pain in the neck. Hover, focus, validation, error, idle… the states alone are enough to drive you bonkers. Let alone formatting for different device sizes. The bottom line is that without some clever planning, there are just too many combinations of assets to juggle. So, let’s take a look at a few tricks to ease the pain.
How to override colors
If you’re anything like me, you use symbols in Sketch every chance you get—pretty much any time you use an element more than one time in your document. Thanks to symbol overrides in Sketch, it’s never been more realistic to turn nearly everything in sight into a symbol for future reuse and syncing. But there’s one inevitable brick wall you’ll eventually hit. While you can override text and images within a symbol, you can’t override the color of something. So, let’s work around that.
Accurate and editable radial progress bars in Sketch
Drawing a radial progress bar in Sketch may not be difficult, but creating one that’s easily editable and mathematically accurate is a different story. Fortunately we’ve got some tricks, and some math, that’ll make your life a whole lot easier.
3 Sketch mistakes for a rough developer handoff
Designers and developers are the key players in creating digital products—and a healthy handoff is critical to keep projects moving smoothly. As a designer, it’s up to you to make sure that handoff sets the developers up for success. So let’s take a look at 3 common mistakes that are easy to make in Sketch and how to fix them.
Oh, and pssstttt… Here’s where to get Craft.
Build an interactive prototype in Sketch in minutes
So you’ve got your beautiful screens designed in Sketch and you’re ready to throw together an initial prototype. In the past, we would sync to InVision, open our browser, and head to Build Mode—but the future is now. Using Craft, we can now prototype for desktop and mobile directly within Sketch and sync the finished result to InVision to test, share, and collaborate. Let’s take a look at the crazy amount of work we can get done in just a couple of quick minutes.
What are you designing with Sketch? Tell us on Twitter: @InVisionApp.
Video Producer at InVision, former UI/UX designer of international in-flight entertainment, and avid automotive enthusiast.
