Sketch Tutorials

9 Tips For Designing Faster and More Efficiently So You Don’t Go Insane

Yeah, it’s a listicle. But these are good.

Author Note and Shameless Plug: These are techniques I picked up while building UX Power Tools design system. I am an active designer and I use this system for 10 hours a day, along with every technique mentioned in this article. If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t be writing about it 😌

1. Use Styles

It pains me how often this needs to be said, but I’ll keep saying it until you start doing it 😉

Fundamental changes are coming to Sketch very soon that will make your lives SO MUCH EASIER if you just buckle down and start using styles. There’s no better time than now.

Using text styles and layer styles makes your design more consistent, and believe it or not, you’ll end up working faster.

2. Make a Stylesheet

Not-required-but-highly-encouraged-reading:

Stylesheets are hugely important in CSS because they allow you to centrally manage how things visually appear across a website. Make a change the button style and every button across the whole site will update.

There’s no reason to not create one for design projects so that you have a similar level of control. All you have to do is have a single artboard with a single instance of every saved text style and layer style. As long as you use these styles throughout your design, you’ll always be able to revisit this stylesheet artboard if you ever want to update the font.

The UX Power Tools design system is built on top of a central stylesheet. You can change fonts and colors on a single page, sync your changes, and the entire system will update to reflect your updates. It’s pretty cool and saves me a ton of time when I’m working on massive client projects.

3. Use Transparency

This is really just a fun party trick, but I showed this technique to a frontend developer last week and I’m still cleaning up the conference room where his mind exploded.

Why do I use transparency instead of hex values?

It’s a neat little trick to ensure that your text looks great over any background color. In the image below, the transparency (second line) looks much better than the grey (first line) because it has taken on the hue of the color below it.There are no tricks; the second line of text is the exact same in each color scenario. It’s just the transparency working for you that makes them look like different text styles. All for the price of one. How convenient!

This little trick can be used for button borders, too. You know how sometimes you want a red button with a slightly darker red border? Try an inner-border with 25% black:

A transparent black border helps you mimic a darker color border without the hex-value headache.

4. Make an Empty State Symbol

I’ve only started doing this recently, but it’s really a nice time-saver. For things like data grids or pages where there may or may not be data depending on what’s been created or configured, it’s a great idea to have a nice empty state to let the user know that not all hope is lost!

Design a standard empty state symbol, then you can quickly reuse it later. I usually have a title, description, illustration, and action button:

Illustration by my wonderfully-talented colleague, Parker McCullough.

For bonus points, make your illustration a nested symbol so you can swap them in and out depending on what page you’re on.

Which brings me to…

5. Create an Illustration Library

This is a bit of an advanced technique, but it’s a simple concept that will make your life easier, and your favorite illustrator’s life easier, too (thanks, Parker)!

Sketch Libraries have been out for a while now, but most people use them for managing their design systems. I recommend using it to manage your illustration library, too!

Create a separate Sketch file for illustrations, then add that as a library: