Sketch Process for Beginners

Here is a few tips on how I use Sketch and the amazing articles I came across while I learned Sketch.

Sketch Principles

I loosely follow a process called Component Based Design which follows Atomic Design by Brad Frost. The articles by Lewis+Humphreys and Tim Van Damme explains the process very well. Essentially, it is breaking down your design group by group to make life easier for you when you work on your project.

How we’re using Component Based Design

A Component-based Workflow for Sketch

1. The base level, the identity group, is composed of colors and typefaces.

This is handy because you can have a shared style for any element that has a fill and a stroke and a shared text style for any text. Once you change the color or font in the shared style on an element, you can then apply it everywhere! Jon Moore created a great Sketch stylesheet tutorial that covers Stylesheets and how to set them up.

Making Stylesheets in Sketch

2. The elements and symbols level.

It is important to use symbols effectively. It is also super useful to use nested overrides. Below are a few articles from both Jon Moore and Lloyd Humphreys on symbol naming conventions, organization, and techniques.

A Better Way to Make Buttons in Sketch

This is, without a doubt, the coolest Sketch technique you’ll see all day.

Sketch symbols best practices (now that nested overrides are a thing)

3. Designing at the pages level.

Joel Beukelman wrote a great tutorial on using the Auto Layout plugin when you’re designing in various screen sizes.

Autolayout in Sketch

Document Setup

In my big working document, I usually have 5 main Sketch pages.

1. Designs: Main high-fidelity designs.
2. Guides: Low-fidelity wireframes guides to easily start a new design.
3. User Flow: Sitemap and user flow.
4. Symbols: This page is automatically created when you create a symbol. I group similar symbols together so it is easy to find them when I need them.
5. Powerpoint: For projects that are always changing and need PDF presentations, I create artboards that are the same dimensions as full-screen size and design the PDF right inside Sketch. I then export out these pages as PDFs and combine them in Acrobat. Here is a tutorial by Jørgen Eidem on creating a slide deck in Sketch.

Create and maintain a Slide Deck from within your Sketch file

Essential Plugins

• Magic Mirror: You can fit your artboards in any perspective with this plugin.
• Nudg.it: Change your big nudge increments.
• Tinyfac.es: Stock avatars you can insert into your designs.
• Craft: Create pre-filled data information (e.g. names, headlines, addresses) and duplicate information with dynamic pre-filled data in specific rows and columns.
• Sketch Measure: Create redlines and dimensions for your developer in an HTML format (they won’t need to download anything).
• Zeplin: Does a similar thing to Sketch Measure but it’s saved in a program you download.
• Auto Layout: Create responsive designs.
• BaseAlign: Align your text layers from the base line instead of the bounding box.
• Stark: Check your designs against colorblindness.
• Sketch Runner: Insert commands directly from your keyboard for faster workflow.
• Sketch Focus: Have a to-do list right inside your Sketch document that links to your artboards.
• Sketch Palettes: Save and load your color palettes.
• Map Generator: Generates a map inside your design file.

Thank you!

I hope this was helpful! Please leave a comment below as I’d love to hear your thoughts on your own design process. If you’d like to check out some of my work, you can connect with me on Linkedin.

Join us for more on Sketch and other prototyping tools.