Customising the Sketch Library Preview Image — beta

Update: jydesign has done more explorations on this and has a template to download

Sketch is bringing native libraries in the next release — here’s a quick tip for managing them

There’s been a lot written about Sketch’s new native library feature, so I won‘t cover old ground. For me, the nested symbols support is a real winner, and I am looking forward to Abstract support!

Here’s a quick tip to help keep things neat and look pretty that I came across after 10 minutes wasted unzipping Sketch files and breaking things.

What you’ll get:

A tidy icon to represent your library, instead of a preview of the library.

How to do it:

1. Make a page just for the icon — I called it cover
2. Create an artboard — the icon is 100×80 so I made the artboard 1000×800
3. Create a big bold image to represent your library
4. Don’t add any other artboards to this page
5. When you save your library, make sure this page is the active page. i.e. don’t save it when you are in a different page

Now, when you add the library to Sketch, you’ll see your icon representing your library! You can use this to show versioning if that’s helpful.