Five plugins to speed up your workflow in Sketch

If you’re a regular Sketch user you probably use at least a couple of plugins everyday. Whether you need help creating awesome animations, adding data visualizations to your interfaces or simply managing your components, Sketch’s expansive plugin ecosystem has a tool to help.

Plugins and the incredible community that develop them are a huge part of what makes Sketch great. In this new series we’re going to be rounding up some of the best plugins and integrations for extending the functionality of Sketch. In our first instalment, we’ve got five plugins to help you speed up your workflow.

WeTransfer

If you work in any creative industry it’s likely you’ve already heard of WeTransfer — one of the simplest and most popular file sending services around.

WeTransfer’s mission statement is all about Flow— enabling “the effortless transfer of ideas from one creative mind to many”, so it makes sense that their recently released Sketch plugin makes sharing your Artboards an almost seamless experience.

To use the plugin you simply select any number of Artboards or Pages you want to share and hit Command-L to upload them to WeTransfer, and generate a link. Then you can copy the link and share it with anyone you like — it’s as simple as that.

Selected Artboards and Pages are uploaded as Sketch files with all of the important stuff like layer order and formatting intact so if you need a quick and easy way to share early ideas or assets this plugin is definitely for you.

You can find the WeTransfer Sketch plugin over on the Apps page of their website.

Jira Cloud

Atlassian are famous for creating an incredibly powerful suite of tools for everything from project management to collaboration and beyond. Their software development tool, Jira, is used by teams to plan, track and release products, all over the world.

With tools like this, integration is often the key to keeping your workflow smooth and simple, and Atlassian’s Jira Cloud plugin allows Sketch users to keep their focus while still accessing all of the great features Jira has to offer.

If your team is already using Jira, this plugin makes it easier than ever to upload Artboards, layers, and slices to your issues. As well as sharing designs, assets, and feedback with your team, you can also discover new issues and even see issues you’ve been assigned or mentioned in, without ever leaving Sketch!

If you’re looking for a way to supercharge your Jira workflow we recommend downloading Jira Cloud for Sketch now! Check out Atlassian’s website to grab the plugin.

Roller by Toybox

Keeping your designs consistent is one of the big challenges every team faces. Ensuring that your text styles are the same, your colors match and your icons are the correct size can take up a lot of time when you’re working on a large project. Roller from Toybox is a design linter plugin that does it all for you.

The plugin works in real time, identifying inconsistencies while you work so you don’t have to wait until the end of a project to start looking for issues. Roller lets you add your style guide so you can check for conflicts, and, if you don’t have a style guide, the plugin uses data trends based on frequently used styles to warn you about inconsistent elements.

If Roller finds a problem it automatically suggests actionable changes, letting you ensure your work is consistent, while seamlessly fitting into your workflow. With Roller you can spend less time thinking about your style guide and more time thinking about your designs.

Frontify

Frontify is a super powerful brand management tool, built for collaboration, that allows you to create web based styles guides, brand portals and UI pattern libraries, as well as storing and managing media assets.

With Frontify’s Sketch plugin you can export your Sketch files directly to your Workspace projects, with the option to upload single changes or sync all Artboards at once. With your Sketch files uploaded you can then use Frontify as a single source of truth for all of your design source files. Uploading new file revisions is simple and Workspace allows you to get feedback and approval from your team in no time.

It works both ways too. You can add your typography and brand colors from your Frontify Style Guide to Sketch and then apply them to your designs, as you work, saving time and ensuring brand consistency.

Zeplin 2.0

You’ve probably already heard of Zeplin but we thought it was worth mentioning here because they’ve just released an update and this Sketch integration is one of our favorites.

Handoff from design to development is a pain point for most teams and can really slow down your workflow if you don’t have the right processes in place. With Zeplin’s Sketch plugin, you can export your Sketch documents and generate development resources automatically.

Zeplin allows you to build out a design system that everyone on your team can access. You can organize your product or brand colors, text styles and components, letting developers create resources and code snippets for frequently used assets.

In Zeplin 2.0 you can export your Sketch symbols to Zeplin and they will be listed as components in your style guide allowing you to organize them into groups and sections. When a developer selects a layer that’s part of a component, they see it in context so they can understand the best way to implement it in the final product. You can find out more about their latest update over on Zeplin’s blog.

If you want to cut down on time spent on handoff to your engineering team, then Zeplin is the perfect place to start. You can try if for free too!

Hopefully these five suggestion will help you supercharge your workflow and let you spend more time concentrating on your designs. If none of these plugins suit your needs then make sure to check out the Extensions page on our website. With hundreds of plugins and integrations created by our amazing developer community, you’re sure to find what you’re looking for. If you’ve got an idea for a plugin of your own then head over to our developer forum to find out more and get started.