6 Sketch plugins to boost your productivity

Our community of plugin developers do incredible things. Whether they’re just trying to overcome a barrier they’ve hit in their own designs, or they’re creating something that makes everyone’s lives easier, their work makes Sketch better.

In this new series, we’re picking out some of the best plugins available for the Mac app. Whether we’re making recommendations for export excellence, proposing plugins for a specific design project, or suggesting ways to speed up your workflow, there’s sure to be something to make your Sketch life even better.

Let’s dive in.

Runner

You can think of Runner a little like Spotlight, but built exclusively for Sketch — and even more powerful. It can help you create and apply Shared Styles, install and run other plugins, insert Symbols and much more, all without lifting your hands from the keyboard. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can keep the tools you use most right at your fingertips. Once you train your brain to start using it for pretty much everything, it’s not just fast — it’s incredibly powerful.

Rename It

Keeping your layers, Symbols, Artboards and more named correctly is super important if you’re trying to stay organized in the Mac app. It doesn’t just make things easier to find — it helps you access what you need through a search (which is especially useful if you’re also using Runner). With Rename It, giving things clear, searchable names is simple. You can rename items in sequence, name them by their width or height, or find and replace words in different names for the times you need to make big changes to your whole project. Now you have no excuse not to stay organized.

Automate Sketch

This one has been described as “the Swiss Army Knife of Sketch plugins”, and with good reason. Automate Sketch packs in an astonishing number of commands that can help you tidy up your documents, quickly select the layers you need, update styles, change prototyping settings and much more. It’s a real time-saver.

Flat Export

Naming your layers effectively can help you work faster. But when it comes to exporting images, great layer names don’t always translate well to file names — especially if you’re exporting things like large groups of icons in one action. That’s where Flat Export comes in. It lets you transform layer names into neat file names instantly. You can choose different naming conventions, including dashes and underscores, and when you hit export they all appear in a single folder of your choosing. Handy.

Artboard Manager

This helpful plugin will keep your Artboards organized neatly with minimum effort on your part. Artboard Manager lets you snap all of your Artboards to a grid, and will rearrange them for you automatically when you add, move or resize one. Plus, you can set custom horizontal and vertical gaps, rename all the Artboards on a page at once, and arrange Symbols automatically, too. If you like the comforting safety of neat grids as much as we do, this will be a lifesaver.

Autotranslate

Time to go international. If you’re designing something for an overseas audience, translating every line of text while you work doesn’t just slow down the process — it makes prototyping near impossible. Thankfully, Autotranslate can help. It lets you quickly and easily translate selected text, your current page, or you entire document into more than 40 languages with just a couple of clicks. It uses Google Translate, which obviously isn’t perfect — but it might come in handy if you’re in a pinch, or just want to quickly get an idea of how your product might look after localization without employing human translators. You’ll need to opt for the Pro version if you don’t have a Google Translate API Key, but for users that work with international teams it might be worth the investment.

This is the first post in our #SketchPlugins series, which will pick out the best extensions for our Mac app. Think we’ve missed one? Let us know your favorites using the hashtag.