Twenty-five indispensable, complimentary add-ons for the Sketch Application
In the realm of graphic design, Sketch has emerged as a popular choice for many designers due to its intuitive interface and extensive features. However, the real power of Sketch lies in its wide array of plugins, which have been developed by the Sketch community to facilitate work and save time.
One such plugin is Sketch Material, a tool that generates complex material design components like tables, chips, forms, and more. This plugin simplifies the process of creating material design elements, making it easier for designers to focus on the aesthetics of their designs.
Another useful plugin is Sketch Data Studio, which converts tables and charts by pulling data directly from a CSV file. This plugin is a boon for designers who need to visualise data quickly and accurately.
For those working on responsive layouts, Fluid is a free Sketch plugin that creates more constraint-based, responsive layouts. This plugin ensures that designs adapt seamlessly across different devices and screen sizes.
Pixel Perfecter is a plugin that identifies pixel imperfect layers and shows a total count. This tool is essential for designers who strive for perfection in their designs, ensuring that every detail is just right.
Mirr.io brings designs to life within Sketch without leaving it. This plugin allows designers to preview their designs in a real-world context, helping them make informed decisions about their designs.
Lorem Ipsum quickly creates and adds Lorem Ipsum generated text to a document, saving designers the time and effort of manually inserting placeholder text.
In recent years, the Sketch community has created various plugins to enhance the software's capabilities. Real-time rendering tools like D5 Render, which transforms basic SketchUp models into photorealistic visuals with AI assistance, live-sync features, and access to extensive asset libraries, have been developed. Custom toolbars for Revit and other 3D software have also been created to streamline workflows.
Looper helps automate the duplication of groups and layers in Sketch, while the unofficial Sketch Plugin Directory offers hundreds of plugins for various tasks freely available.
Slinky is a powerful plugin that allows exporting Sketch designs as HTML email templates, while Marvel Plugin sends Sketch artboards directly to Marvel.app for quick prototyping.
Social Artboards add artboard presets of common social media image sizes, making it easy for designers to create posts for various platforms.
Blade Plugin automatically generates HTML from your designs, while Sketch Palettes saves and loads colours into the colour picker. Measure Sketch Plugin helps in getting designs just perfect, and Dynamic Button creates buttons with fixed paddings regardless of text characters.
Lunacy is a native Windows app that opens, edits, and stores .sketch files, making it accessible for Windows users. Content Generator creates dummy data such as avatars, names, geo location data, etc., while Sketch Syntax Highlighter automatically highlights the syntax of any code snippet within Sketch.
Export Assets Sketch Plugin exports assets for Android, iOS, Windows Phone in Sketch, and Day Player allows adding placeholder images from popular services into any Sketch doc.
Compo is a Sketch plugin that makes it easier to work with interface components, while Icon Stamper creates multiple sizes of iOS icons quickly. Logodrop is a Sketch Plugin to get brand logos right into Sketch App, and Sharpen Images adds Unsharp Mask filters to image and shape layers with image fills in Sketch.
Click-Thru Prototype creates a HTML click-through prototype of a website design, and Style Inventory gives an overview of all used styles and allows merging similar ones. Finally, CSSketch allows editing and mocking up designs by attaching a stylesheet and supports Less, while Sketch Iconfont allows using icon fonts in Sketch documents. Generate GIF generates animated GIFs from a sequence of artboards, completing the list of powerful Sketch plugins.
These plugins, among many others, demonstrate the power and versatility of Sketch, transforming it from a simple design tool into a comprehensive design solution. Whether you're a seasoned designer or a beginner, these plugins can help streamline your workflow and take your designs to the next level.
