Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/best-plugins-for-sketch-app/
Over the course of 2015 Sketch App has continued to gain mindshare in the design community thanks to its easy-to-use features and straightforward interface.
But even though it's a powerful tool straight out of the box, after a while you might find yourself wanting to tweak things to your liking a little. Thankfully a excellent range of plugins now exist that allow you to customize and extend the way Sketch works. In this article we will briefly the ten plugins I recommend to new Sketch users.
The Sketch Toolbox
Before we dig any deeper into Sketch, I suggest you download and install Sketch Toolbox. This is a simple plugin manager not unlike the ones we are used to seeing in code editors such as Sublime Text or Atom.
Toolbox allows you to easily browse the most popular plugins available for Sketch and with a single click it will automatically download and install new plugins while also keeping up to date the previously downloaded ones. It is super time efficient and reliable even if it is technically still in beta.
You can download Sketch Toolbox here.
1. Day Player – Add placeholder images
Adding placeholder images manually into your designs can become a real hassle. Finding stock photos, cropping them and what not is time consuming, particularly when you are on a tight schedule and approaching a deadline.
Day Player gives a way to shortcut this struggle by enabling you to choose from a stack of different placeholder image service providers (like the ones web developer usually use) and adding them to your designs. Available options include placehold.it, lorempixel.com, and fillmurray.com amongst others.
The best part is that, based on the service of your choice, you can adjust parameters such as width, height, image category text, or other settings you might want to see on your placeholder.
Link: https://github.com/tylergaw/day-player
2. Content Generator
Content Generator for Sketch is by far the most useful plugin I've found when it comes to prototyping and dummy data generation. It saves you an enormous amount of time and it's super easy to use.
It can generate almost any type of dummy data you may need from avatars, names and plain text content. Just select the layer you want filled with dummy data, select the type of data you want from the plugin dropdown menu and "VoilĂ "! There you have it.
Link: https://github.com/timuric/Content-generator-sketch-plugin
3. Dynamic Buttons
One big downside of current design applications is that they are not natively responsive — they don’t adapt.
Lets take CSS for example. When you develop a button in CSS the padding around the labeling text automatically adapts so it keeps the padding you defined in the properties without any extra effort.
The 'Dynamic Buttons' plugin does exactly same thing. It allows buttons to automatically expand based on the text inside them with a preset padding. Dynamic Buttons is your dear friend when you are building big, complex UI designs, as it saves lots of time and spares you frustration.
Link: https://github.com/ddwht/sketch-dynamic-button
4. AEIconizer
AEIconzier plugin is my personal favorite. It removes the inconvenience of designing or resizing different versions of a single iOS app icon. After you have created your icon in any square sized artboard, run this plugin to generate all of the needed sizes for your iOS icons.
AEIconizer regenerates and replaces all artboards that were generated before, every time it is executed, but it will never delete the original artboard you worked with in the beginning. It is great for testing and exporting your iOS app icons without needing another exporting plugin.
Link: https://github.com/tadija/aeiconizer”
5. Sketch Measure
The measure plugin for Sketch is by far the best measurement and design specs tool there is. You can easily measure and get the sizes, margins or paddings, and coordinates of any given layer alone, and two or more layers at a time, relative to the type of measurement you are working with.
This plugin is really straight forward and easy to use. You can interact with it via the interface or through keyboard shortcuts. It really comes in handy when you are collaborating with other designers working on big design, UX projects.
Link: https://github.com/utom/sketch-measure
6. Sketch Page Switch
It may seem like a really “dumb” plugin but don’t be too quick to judge. It will likely amaze you with the amount of precious time it will save you by just enabling you to switch pages quickly through keyboard shortcuts. It's weird that Sketch does not support this feature out of the box, but oh well… that is what plugins are for, right.
Link: https://github.com/mauehara/sketch-page-switch
7. Style Inventory for Sketch
Style Inventory helps brings structure to the chaotic nature of design. It may well be the Sketch plugin with the most sub features.
Using Style Inventory you may easily select layers by color, name and style. It also has the impressive feature of easily being able to create a style guide by generating artboards of all referenced text styles and colors in any given Sketch design.
More details about the extensive features of Style Inventory can be found here
Link: https://github.com/getflourish/Sketch-Style-Inventory
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