What’s New

A fresh look for macOS Big Sur

With this release, we’re excited to introduce a UI redesign that fits right in with the new macOS Big Sur design language. It’s the same Sketch you know and love, but with every detail reconsidered — from a full-height sidebar, to a refreshed Inspector, and all-new iconography throughout the app. The biggest change you’ll notice is the toolbar. To make room for Big Sur’s new inline document titles, we’ve introduced a new default toolbar and combined some items to keep things clean and uncluttered. As ever, you can change your toolbar items at any time by heading to View > Customize Toolbar…. If you can’t upgrade to Big Sur just yet, don’t worry. We’ve spent time making sure that things still look and feel great in older versions of macOS.

Color Variables

We’re excited to introduce this long-requested feature and one of the final building blocks for a comprehensive design system in Sketch. When you apply a Color Variable to a fill, border or anywhere you can apply solid colors, they’ll stay linked. If you edit a Color Variable, you’ll see that change reflected across every part of your document that uses it. Color Variables replace solid color presets and when you open a document we’ll automatically convert any existing color presets that belong to it. You’ll see the option to create a new Color Variable in the Color Popover.

Components View (Beta)

The Components View is a new home for your document’s local Symbols, Text and Layer Styles, and Color Variables. By bringing them together and giving them the space they deserve, we’ve made it easier for you to keep them organized and adjust their properties. In other words, there’s finally a proper place to preview and edit your text and layer styles — and that’s just the start.

Insert Window

Alongside the Components View, we’re introducing a new, separate Insert Window that makes finding and inserting components faster than ever. It brings together all of the Symbols, Text and Layer Styles, and Color Variables from your enabled Libraries, and displays them with beautiful, big previews that make browsing easy. Simply press c on your keyboard to open it, start typing to search for the component you need, then drag and drop it onto your Canvas.

Say Hello To Assistants

With this release, we’re introducing Assistants — a helping hand for your designs. Assistants can automatically check your documents to help you spot issues, stay consistent with design systems, prepare your files for collaboration, and follow your team’s rules. You can find out more, discover and download Assistants in the new Assistants Directory, or read our documentation to see how they work.

Performance improvements

We’re working hard to speed things up across the app and this release includes a few key updates. We’ve cleaned up our code around Symbols so working with them (especially in complex documents) should feel a lot more responsive. We’ve also fixed some particular performance bottlenecks around shadows and layers with background blur and saturation. There are a lot of small changes here, but they all add up to a smoother, faster Sketch.

Embed fonts in documents

With this release, we’re introducing the option to embed font files in individual documents. You can do this in any document by choosing Text > Document Fonts… and selecting the fonts you want to embed. Embedding fonts makes it easier to share documents with others and ensures that text layers render accurately — even if they don’t have the right fonts installed. It also ensures text layers render correctly whenever you view your documents on Cloud.

We’re busy putting the finishing touches on some very exciting upcoming releases, so we’ve taken a step back with this one to focus on some important bug fixes and key improvements that all add up to a better experience.