(The deck for this transcript is available at https://speakerdeck.com/bomberstudios/supercharging-sketch)
When Sketch 1 came out, 5 years ago, I remember spending a few minutes playing with it and thinking "this could totally replace Fireworks" (my weapon of choice at the time). I sent Pieter an email to tell him how excited I was about the app, and while writing it I thought "you know what? This thing would be awesome if it was scriptable"
This is the email I sent him:
4 days later, he sent me a beta version with scripting enabled. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Of course I had no idea at the time that I'd end up working with these fine folks, or that the Sketch plugin & services ecosystem would become a thing.
But the one thing I knew, after working with other scriptable tools, was that the perfect tool for everyone does not exist. If you want the ultimate design tool, one that does all of the things you need and none of the things you don't, you have to make it yourself.
Start with a lean, agile, focused tool, and complement it with the plugins and 3rd party tools that you, and no one else, need to get your job done.
So today, I'm here to say thanks to Bohemian Coding for creating my perfect design tool, and to show you some of the amazing services and plugins you can use to make your work easier and your design even more awesome.
Small confession: one of the best moments of the week is when somebody tweets about a plugin they have done, and we all go: “WTF, how did they do that?”. Being amazed about the stuff people do with your product is one of the best feelings you can get.
Most of these services integrate with Sketch via a small command line util called Sketch Tool: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/tool/ which is free to use (and I encourage you developers to play with it, since it can probably be used to automate a lot of the stuff you or your designers currently do manually)
The tool for detailed interaction prototyping. They were one of the first desktop tools to add Sketch integration, and we really love them.
Origami’s latest release included Sketch integration.
Flinto (who you may know for their awesome & easy to use web-based prototyping tool) released a desktop app a few weeks ago, and you have to play with it. They shipped with Sketch support from day 1.
Marvel, another contender for the web-based prototyping tool throne. They integrate with Sketch via a plugin.
Document sharing, version control, specs, and asset generation, on a multiplatform environment (Web, Mac, Windows and Linux)
Zeplin is a very nice tool for specs & style guides generation. It has a desktop and a web app, and they keep adding features. Their small team is really friendly and responsive : )
Invision started its life as a quick prototyping tool, but in its current form is a collection of extremely useful tools (prototyping, automatic asset extraction, version control, collaboration, shared whiteboards, …). They keep adding features, so you get more bang for your buck, and their Sketch integration is nothing short of amazing (example: you hit Cmd+S to save your file and BOOM, all your assets and screens are exported automatically and synced with all your team members)
I recently learnt about this tool (as I said, there’s literally one new tool coming out each week, and sometimes we hear about them when they launch). They have a shared asset library, which you can use from Sketch and Photoshop, so you can keep working with team members who haven’t switched to Sketch (yet : )
Magic Mirror, perspective mockups for Sketch
Last year in Paris, Meng To asked us if we’d ever add this feature to Sketch. We discussed it, but we were not sure about how to go about adding it. So imagine our surprise when this was introduced. Our reaction to this was actually: HOW ON EARTH DID THIS GUY PULL THIS OFF?
Content Generator, by Timur Carpeev
We met Timur last year in Amsterdam (hi, Timur!) and this is one of our favourite plugins out there. And we’re not alone, judging from the amount of stars his project has on GitHub : )
Dynamic Layout, by Facebook Design
Sketch Notebook, by Marcos Vidal
Style Inventory, by Florian Schulz
Let’s you generate a style guide from your document
This is a question I get many times: “Can I make a plugin that does…?” so I’ve prepared a list of all the things you can do at the moment via plugins…
Curently we have plugins that…
- Talk https://github.com/marcosvidal/sketch-speaker
- Tweet
- Send to Slack https://github.com/shahruz/send-to-slack
- Export Android Assets https://github.com/todoriliev/generate-android-assets
- Play 2048 https://gist.github.com/bomberstudios/11215874
- Upload https://wake.io
- Git Commit https://github.com/almonk/sketchgit
- Translation https://github.com/kristof/sketch-i18n
- Get Instagram Photos https://github.com/abynim/sketchsquares
- Generate Code https://github.com/charimon/iosviews
- Animate https://github.com/dawidw/frame-sequencer
- Simulate Color Blindness https://github.com/bomberstudios/sketch-color-blindness
So the answer is probably “yes”. Just go out there and read other people’s code : )
If you are a designer who wants to work less, or a developer looking for a fun challenge, sketch plugins are a very nice way to flex your brain muscles. And since our public today has a nice mix of developers and designers, I urge you to meet each other and think of cool stuff you could be doing with Sketch.
Some links:
Thanks!