Best Sketch Plugins 2021

Sketch is a powerful UI design tool and currently Atypic’s go-to program for designing digital experiences. Unlike Photoshop, Sketch is a vector-based program, built specifically for UI design. One thing that makes Sketch so robust is it’s developer community. If you’re looking for a feature that isn’t built into Sketch, you can be sure there’s a plugin for it.

So what are sketch plugins? Plugins are features that can be installed to the Sketch app to enhance the program’s functionality. They are created by developers of the app community and can either be purchased or downloaded for free. Sketch’s plugin manager makes it easy to manage, disable, and update plugins within the app.

Our team is always looking to improve our workflow and efficiency when designing digital experiences, and sketch plugins have helped us do so. In this post we’ll share some of our must have Sketch plugins.

1.  Copy & Paste Guides

2.  Paddit

3.  Distributor

4.  Image Optim

5.  Sketch Palettes

6.  Rename It

Copy & Paste Guides

Copy & Paste Guides is useful for quickly copying and pasting guides from one artboard to another. Guides are helpful in setting up page margins and columns within your document to keep consistency throughout the design. This is important, especially when working in larger documents. It also allows you to remove all guides from an artboard instead of manually deleting each guideline.

Paddit

Paddit is a great way to stay consistent with padding, spacing and alignment. When paddy is applied to a layer, it will automatically resize itself around other objects with the specified pixel amount. Our team often uses this with buttons when designing digital products. It helps us keep padding consistent when changing out different verbiage in call to action buttons.

Distributor

Distributor is a plugin that takes selected objects or layers and distributes them vertically or horizontally with a specified amount of spacing. The plugin allows you to distribute evenly between either object edges or centers. Consistent spacing of objects in Sketch is important for our team in ensuring this translates properly to development.

Image Optim

Site speed and page load are primary goals for any digital product we build. ImageOptim allows us to compress images exported from Sketch, reducing disk space and bandwidth. It helps ensure our sites are loading and running at the fastest speed possible while still maintaining the quality of the images.

Sketch Palettes

Sketch Palettes is a great tool for documenting color palettes for specific projects. As a collaborative team, we often have multiple designers on the same project. This feature allows us to save, and load defined palettes from one document to another. Consistency in our designs is key before passing off anything to our development team.

Rename It

Rename It helps keep your Sketch files organized, and allows you to batch rename layers and artboards. It includes options to rename by sequence, selected layer(s) and width and height. Keeping files organized is important, especially when collaborating with other designers. This plugin eliminates possible errors and inconsistencies when renaming layers manually.