views
Tool Tips — Lift Your Sketch Skills with these 5 Plugins
I’ve been working up a storm in Sketch and have used approximately 30+ plugins so far. A colleague recently asked me to give her a low-down of what I use to increase productivity, and I thought I would share them with you.
1. Sketch Toolbox
This is my main way of discovering plugins. It’s also a way of keeping my installed plugins in check and organized.
With Sketch Toolbox, you can search and install plugins without much hassle. The interface is simple and gives you a clutter free overview of plugins you have installed.
2. Craft by InVision
What I mostly use Craft for is dummy content creation. It’s fast, reliable and resourceful in that way. It outputs the data you need in no time and gives a realistic looking content (or good enough for placeholder purposes).
Sometimes I use Duplicate and/or Styles generator to duplicate some layers or replace a color/font, but that’s about it.
3. Runner
If you’re big on shortcuts, this is your go-to plugin. If you’re using Alfred instead default Spotlight for Mac, you’ll feel right at home with this one.
Runner gives you a lot of options. You can run plugins and menu actions from a command-like interface. You can also go to pages, artboards, groups, and layers quickly.
Inserting symbols, creating a symbol or shared style is pretty dope too, as well as applying a shared style. All that on a shortcut tap.
4. SF Font Fixer
A default iOS font was introduced a while back and San Francisco became a standard.
Sketch has a few hiccups when it comes to proper kerning of this font, so this plugin takes care of that for you. You select your text layer, run the plugin and it’s done!
5. Clipboard Fill
One of my favorites right here, especially when doing something product UI related.
When you find a suitable image you wanna use in your design, you go to right click and ‘Copy Image’. Then, select your layer, run the plugin and the layer is filled with the image.
Be careful though for what images you wanna use and check for copyrights attached to them. Unsplash is a good site to browse for placeholder images.
There’s a ton of them I could have mentioned like Rename It, TinyFaces and Swatches, but these are essential to me as I use them almost every day. I hope these help you and increase your productivity.
Happy designing!
