25 best sketch plugins to download now
Sketch plugins can transform how you approach your work and get things done. These 25 best Sketch plugins will give you the boost you need
Sketch is one powerful UI design tool, made all the more potent because of all the useful Sketch plugins out there.
Since designers have the freedom to make Sketch their own, this has helped grow a big community of loyal users who create plugins and add-ons. This makes our lives easier when designing solutions to even the most difficult of design problems.
With the right plugins, you can start to have a lot of fun with Sketch, especially if you want to speed up your workflow, be a more efficient designer and create stunning designs.
In this post, let’s discover 25 of the best sketch plugins that you should download now.
Justinmind Sketch
Are you prototyping beautiful user interfaces in Sketch and want to spice them up with a punch of interactivity? With Justinmind Sketch you can export your designs directly into the interactive prototyping tool with just a click.
And no sweat — all your individual layers are preserved exactly as you made them in Sketch.
This powerful plugin allows you to add animation and effects to your UI elements making your design process faster than before.
ImageOptim
Enormous image file sizes are the bain of many designers’ lives. That’s why it’s a good idea to compress them. That way, you can stop your system from getting bloated and slowing you down.
ImageOptim let’s users compress their JPG and PNG images, saving precious disk space and bandwidth — all without losing any quality. Before you get crazy with compression, be sure to have the app installed on your computer first.
Find & Replace
Changing the copy in a user interface is an intricate and, at times, drawn-out process. Is that one word or two? Does that word need a hyphen?
It’s vital to get the copywriting right, especially if you want you keep your audience engaged with mobile app or website.
Imagine this whole time you’ve been creating a UI design and you’ve been misspelling your client’s brand name. And you’ve spelled it incorrectly hundreds of times. Don’t worry, that’s where find and replace comes in really useful.
Find and replace will search your entire Sketch file and replace the word with the one you want, just like any other find and replace function. What makes this plugin brilliant is that you can limit replacing text to just the layer you have selected or the entire artboard.
Sketch Measure
Speed up the designer developer process with Sketch Measure. The plugin has a bunch of features that make spec export easier and accurate.
With exact measurements of defined elements and the ability to export styles into HTML / CSS, your collaboration just got an upgrade.
Sketch Toolbox
Sketch Toolbox is a plugin manager that lets you browse the most popular plugins for Sketch and download them. Toolbox will automatically keep them up to date for you.
That way, you can stay on top of all your plugins and keep your workflow organized as possible.
Magic Mirror 3
When creating mockups, you can really wow your client when your UI is in situ. Want to show a really cool screen you designed but in context? With Magic Mirror 3, that’s possible.
Designers can use the Sketch plugin to create perspective mockups. Before, you would have to do this sort of witchcraft in Photoshop but with Magic Mirror, you no longer have to leave Sketch to do what you want.
Now you can transform your artboards into shapes and create perfect perspective mockups thanks to Magic Mirror. It is worth noting that this sort of magic has a price and Magic Mirror comes in at the price of one cup of coffee a month, $1.99.
Of course, you still can’t add interactivity with Magic Mirror. Sad trombone.
Plant
When it comes to collaboration between designers and developers, it’s important to get version control right. Having assets all over the place only causes confusion and slows a project down.
What Plant does is help designers work in a linear fashion. This keeps the workflow simple.
The beauty of Plant is that it’s integrated into Sketch and adds a nifty side panel instead of relying on an external app. With a glance of your project outline, all commits in one place, Plant is a mighty addition to any designer’s toolbox.
Sketch Style Inventory
Experimenting and playing around are part of the design process. Iterating upon your designs helps us narrow down to the style that we want the final product to have.
Sometimes you create really nice styles and other times, not so much. With Sketch Style Inventory, you can keep all your styles in one place.
Icon Font
Icon Font makes using icons a doddle. With Icon Fonts, you can choose from thousands upon thousands of icons from Font Awesome and Ionicons. Icon Font lets you convert the icons to outline, too.
Sort Me
Getting lost in a labyrinth of layers is a nightmare. Sort Me is a Sketch plugin that allows you to order your layers and artboards by name, saving you precious design time.
Runner
Designers have a ton of shortcuts to remember. Whether it’s in Illustrator, Sketch or Photoshop our heads are filled with hundreds of shortcuts to make our workflow smoother. Sometimes though that can lead to confusion. Thankfully Runner is here to help.
What Runner does is supercharge your workflow by giving you an intuitive interface. No longer do you have to scour through menus to get what you want, simply press a few keys on your keyboard and you’re good to go.
Sketch Focus
If your productivity needs an overhaul then look no further than Sketch Focus. Stay on task by adding notes and tasks to your documents. You can also link layers to your items and use it as a personal change log, making Sketch Focus a powerful productivity booster.
Blade
If you want to step up your web design game and get quick HTML of your designs then check out Blade. Blade lets you automatically generate HTML web prototypes from your design and names the HTML and CSS selectors too.
Sketch Data Studio
If you’re using data in your design then check out Sketch Data Studio. The plugin lets you generate data tables and charts easily and automatically from real data.
Lorem Ipsum
Good old Lorem Ipsum. How different the world of design would be without you. This simple plugin does what you might expect: create and add Lorem Ipsum generated text to your design.
Content Generator
Content Generator is like the more muscular cousin of Lorem Ipsum. It generates dummy data but for a wide array of different reasons: avatars, names, location data are just a few of the ways you can use Content Generator to create dummy data for your designs.
Sketch Palettes
Go crazy with color using Sketch Palettes. You can save and load colors into the Sketch color picker as well as share them with others who have the plugin installed.
Launchpad
If you want precise and tidy design files, get Launchpad. You can use it to set fixed margins for layers, symbols and artboards. On top of that, it’s a great plugin to create responsive designs, making handoff that little bit easier.
Confetti
Generate confetti with a click. Confetti is distributed within a grid, which you can fully customize, to get the exact design you’re looking for. Add a pop to your designs and download Confetti.
Lingo
Design works best when there is one source of truth. With Lingo, you and your team can collectively create that source of truth. What Lingo lets you do is create a consistent design system, ensuring consistency from start to finish. No longer do designers have to manage separate libraries for UI components.
User Flows
This Sketch plugin helps you to effortlessly create those all important flow diagrams in Sketch. With User Flows you can define links, add conditional logic and show or hide connections, making building a mobile app or website super easy.
Looper
Looper is a great tool that lets you create geometric and organic patterns by duplicating groups and layers. Designers can control properties like Rotate, Scale and Opacity while they duplicate.
Skatter
Similar to confetti, this Sketch plugin lets you create random patterns. All you need to do is make the shapes, Scatter will do the rest.
Blender
Blender takes two shapes of different colors and makes a gradient out of them, creating that perfectly blended look.
Slinky
Has your boss just asked you last minute to design an email? Well with Slinky, you can rustle up that email and export it in ready to send HTML template in no time.
Conclusion
A good designer needs a well furnished toolbox. Without a good set of tools, your work will suffer and you’ll needlessly waste your precious time. With these 25 best sketch plugins, your workflow will get the boost it needs.
