Improved snapping and a Dark Mode toggle in Sketch 54

Sketch 54 has arrived and this update includes some small but important changes, designed to improve your experience in the app. Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights in the latest version:

• We’ve continued our overhaul of snapping behaviour in the app, including improvements around measurements and smart guides.
• You can now toggle between Dark Mode and Light Mode and choose a dark or light Canvas, independent of your system settings.
• You can now add images from Data sources, via the Image Fill tab in the Fill Popover.
• More than 60 other enhancements and bug fixes, including improvements to the Inspector and override management.

Hit the lights

Since we implemented Dark Mode in Sketch 52, one of the most frequent requests we’ve received is the ability to use Sketch in Dark Mode without switching your macOS system setting. In Sketch 54, we’re bringing a Dark Mode toggle to the app, so you can use whatever mode you prefer, regardless of your other preferences.

To switch Sketch to Dark Mode (on macOS Mojave), just go to the General pane in Preferences and you’ll be able to choose from three options under “Appearance” — Light Mode, Dark Mode and System Default. If you choose System Default, Sketch will follow your macOS settings, just as it does now.

You’ll also see a new “Canvas” setting in the General Preferences. This allows you to switch between a light and dark canvas in Sketch, regardless of your Appearance settings. Dark Mode with a light canvas? No problem! This can be really useful if you’re working on a project with dark colors but don’t want to switch the whole UI to Light Mode.

Snap happy

Snapping — it’s one of those features that, if it’s working properly, should be barely noticeable. In Sketch 54 we’ve totally overhauled the snapping behaviour in Sketch to help speed up your workflow and make working in the canvas feel smooth and intuitive.

First off, we’ve updated the appearance of measurements to make them easier to read. You can also change the color of measurements and smart guides in Preferences, so you get more control over how your whole Canvas looks.

When you resize a layer it will now snap to the height or width of overlapping layers. Smart guides should now also appear more consistently, across the board, when moving and resizing layers, including moving layers via the keyboard.

If you’ve ever had trouble lining up a Symbol on insert, we feel your pain. In Sketch 54, smart guides will now appear when inserting new Symbol instances.

We’ve improved snapping for text layers too. In the latest update, if you click-and-drag to insert a new text layer, you’ll see it now snaps to existing layers. And, if you’re changing the height of a text layer, the bounding box will now snap to the last line of text.

Finally, we’ve also made some improvements around snapping and Artboards. Layers should now snap as expected when they’re dragged in or out of an Artboard and we fixed a bug that sometimes caused Artboards to snap to their own Grid or Layout when moved in the Canvas.

Image Fills with Data

In Sketch 53 we added an all-new Fill Popover, jam packed with new features, and with this lastest update, we’re making some more improvements.

Now, when you’re adding Image Fills via the popover, you’ll see a new option to add an Image Fill from a Data source and a little Refresh button will also appear beside the Data icon allowing you to update that fill with a new random image from your data source.

If you’re a power user, you can now access the system Color Panel by Option-clicking the color well in the Inspector. We also fixed a number of bugs that were affecting the Fill Popover, including where:

• creating a new Text Style while editing text wouldn’t apply it to the layer
• document colors in certain added Libraries wouldn’t be available in the Color Popover
• undo wouldn’t work for the Hex field in the Fill Popover
• moving or copying a color or gradient between Global and Document presets wouldn’t keep its name
• a new color or gradient preset would not reveal the collapsed presets section
• the empty gradient preset placeholder would not appear alongside the solid color presets
• the grid/list switcher would appear incorrectly in the Fill Popover.

Over 60 other improvements and bug fixes

As always, we’ve been listening to your feedback and we’ve made more than 60 other improvements and bug fixes, based on your suggestions. Here are some of the highlights:

• 支持简体中文: Sketch now supports Simplified Chinese and will reflect the system language setting.
• You can now toggle the visibility for all overrides on a Symbol master.
• You can now access the Replace With menu when Control-clicking a Symbol override in the Layer List.
• We’ve added the ability for Data to be applied to layers inside a group, when a group is selected.
• You can now click-and-drag to scrub values for the Dash and Gap border properties in the Inspector.

You can find a full list of bug fixes and improvements on our Updates page.

Sketch 54 is a free update for everyone with an active license. If your license has expired you can renew it here and you’ll get Sketch 54 plus a whole year’s worth of updates included!

We’d love to hear your opinions on the latest features and updates, so get in touch and let us know what you think. If you have any questions or feedback, you can contact us via our support page or reach out on Twitter and Facebook.