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Improving design skills and workflows for UI/UX designers

I have been a fan of Sketch for the past 12months and to be honest, it has solved a big problem for me. Made me become a better designer. Not only did my interface design skills improved but my overall workflow process became tremendously faster.

Knowing some of the values Sketch offers designers is the ability to create plugins that suites our specific needs, this has added a great value to some of the missing features in Sketch and increased productivity for designers. Today, I would like to share some of those plugins (based on how frequently I used them) that I will probably be taking along with me in 2017.

Align To

Plugin that align object relative to more options for Bohemian Coding’s Sketch 3. It provides that align relative to key object in Sketch 3.

Because original align function in Sketch only provide that align to a selection and an Artboard, this plugin port illustrator’s function of align to key objects. I box (using shapes) everything in Sketch, which makes it easy for me to duplicate that element and make minor changes.

sketch-export-assets

Export assets for Android, iOS, Windows Phone in Sketch.

I have been designing mobile apps for almost 80-percent of the whole period, sharing assets with devs was a breeze. Not having to overthink the sizes for MDPI, HDPI …

Craft by InVision LABS

Craft is a suite of plugins to let you design with real data in mind. Manage them via the new Craft Manager for incredibly easy updating.

This plugin is a killer, duplicating contents, customizing the type of content … really made creating mockups and prototypes a whole lot faster. I certainly can’t do without Craft :)

Fluid for Sketch

Fluid is a Sketch plugin that provides a means to create more constraint-based, responsive designs. It is based on Auto Layout constraints.

Designers, please lets not guess-work. Accuracy and consistency is VERY important, this plugin solves the problem. What I usually do is create a shape (e.g. rectangle), add my elements (e.g. text), forusing the Align To to position it (e.g. center left) and then use Fluid to add proper padding to the left (e.g. 20px).

Sketch Runner

Runner helps you to get around Sketch quicker by giving you an intuitive interface to supercharge your daily workflow. Stop searching through your menu & start running commands directly from your keyboard.

Sketch Icon-Font

This plugin helps you easily insert and manage icons from icon fonts.

Another amazing plugin, as a designer, some of the ways we add beauty to our interface is using icons. This plugin provide you with several options from Material Design icons to FontAwesome.

Content Generator for Sketch

Content generator allows you quickly create dummy data such as avatars, names, geo location data etc.

Honestly, I don’t use this much but since Craft lacks the ability to search, I mainly use this plugin as a replacement and also the fact I can add profile faces.

Dynamic button plugin for Sketch

Dynamic button plug-in for Sketch.app allows to create buttons with fixed paddings no matter what text you add.

Again, another plugin I’m using less and less due to using other plugin to achieve the same result (Align To + Fluid). Once in a while, I use it for creating my buttons.

Sketch Measure

Make it fun to create specs for developers and teammates.

Exactly as it says, informing my devs on the exact pixels is quite important. With this plugin, I can easily show them those numbers :)

Artboard Tools

Sketch.app plugins for arranging artboards and navigating between artboards.

When you realize your artboards is going 50+, you need to start putting things in order. Even sometimes when working on crazy projects and you need to quickly create a test screen on the side … doing this multiple times can make your whole page become messy, this plugin comes to my rescue.

Sketch Prism

Creates a beautiful artboard with all the colors in your ‘Document Colors’ with its respective color label in a variety of formats.

This plugin is fantastic, the ability to export my color palette in different format is another productivity booster.

Options to export Sketch Prism

Sketch Toolbox

A super simple plugin manager for Sketch.

Of course, installing most of those plugins became a breeze using this plugin. You search, you find, you install … thats all :)

Conclusion

This year has been a great success for me as a designer, I switched to design sometime last year and was experimenting with different tools until I settled with Sketch. No regrets!

If you like this post, remember to recommend it and also don’t forget to share your Sketch plugins in the comment.

Thanks for reading and happy new year in advance.