How to Build a Design System in Sketch
Want to Find Sketch Alternative? Try It Free!
Wondershare Mockitt Prototype Designer realizes easy & rapid prototyping for iPhone, Android, Websites, and more. Drag and drop to create wireframes and prototypes.
This article will look at how to set a Sketch design system and the process to follow while you are on Sketch. Design is now the foundation of almost every business, and you must have the right tools to help you build your designs. The sketch is a lightweight, intuitive tool that easily allows UX designers or other designers to prepare their design prototypes quickly. With the new sketch 60, new features have been added that make it easier to work together in a team, but it also speeds up creating, sharing, using and maintaining the design system sketch.
- Part 1: What is the Sketch Design System
- Part 2: How to build a design system in Sketch[Step by Step]
- Part 3: The Best Tool for Prototyping
What is the Sketch Design System and Its Advantages
A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards of the companies/products, that can be brought together to build many applications. Larger companies such as Uber, Airbnb have now started to incorporate their unique design systems by utilizing and collecting reusable and repetitive components. With these, a set of standards guiding the use of those components has changed the speed and pace of creation and innovation within their teams.
With the help of atomic design sketch components and design systems, it is now easy for designers to reuse the components to keep the designs consistent. Components can be created with the help of symbols and reuse anywhere. By making an update in one place, it is instantly reflected across the whole design. Therefore, having design systems can save designers a lot of time and get work done faster.
Advantages of a Design System
- Increased Efficiency - With the help of a design system, designers do not repeatedly keep building similar components from scratch. Design systems will enable designers to reuse the initially made components, thereby increasing efficiency.
- Maintaining Consistency - With the same designs being used and not replicating them, it becomes much easier to create consistent experiences across different platforms. As the design systems introduce a shared set of principles and rules to build these components
- Speed and Scale - Design systems provide the shared library of reusable components across all platforms, making it build the products faster. Since the making of designs takes less time, the production of designs also happens in bulk, further increasing the design scale.
How to Build a Design System in Sketch
Few steps need to be followed to create a design system in Sketch. The steps are as follows.
Step 1. Building a Strong Color Palette.
While selecting your color palette, keep the Base colors primary, secondary, and tertiary. Keeping the base colors minimum will give you a clearer idea for your design and help you create a beautiful clean design. It's important to also add Black and White to your color palette, which will help icons.
Also, implement Red, Green, Yellow base colors, which often mean- Warning, Success, and Error notifications.
Step 2. Having a Good Set of Typography Styles
While building a design system, it would be recommended to stick to the 2 Font Family rule.
Do not mix more than two fonts, and else the design will look very overwhelming with various Alignments, colors, and sizes.
Step 3. Elevations and Shadows
Creating various elevations and shadows for both light and dark designs and primary and secondary base colors can help a lot and give your design system a lot of versatility. The ability to quickly create a shape in Sketch and assigning shadows of varying strengths in an instant can massively cut down on time.
Step 4. Create Icons and Symbols
Colors, Typography, and icons are the backbone for creating a great system. Therefore, keep the icons and symbols ready and in hand as it will feature in your design elements in some shape or form.
Therefore, following these four steps while you are starting to create your design systems will significantly help. These elements will slowly bring your Sketch Design System to life, enabling you to reuse these components as and when required.
The Best tool for Prototyping
If you are looking for a powerful tool for prototyping, then Wondershare Mockitt is your best bet. With this tool, designers can create prototypes for apps websites and are compatible with iOS, Windows, Ubuntu. This software enables creating prototypes as well as animating them. This software's user interface is clean, comfortable to use, allowing new time users to efficiently and smoothly operate the software and create robust designs. It also has a free version for users who are just getting into the field of designing. Therefore, with the free version, they can play around with the great features that Mockitt has to offer.
This software is packed with rich features, helping designers to create their digital designs easily and quickly.
- Templates for Prototyping - Mockitt offers a vast icon and component library, offering over 20+ industry specific sketch design system template, making it extremely easy for a beginner to work as an expert. This way, no coding is required to create the designs. With this, there is a drag and drop option available through which users can add, arrange and connect components with a single click
- Create Interactive Effects an Animated element - There are many interactive features, such as gestures and transitions, to create real lifelike prototypes. By just dragging and dropping the links, users can create links between pages. Users can also create animated elements from the interactive page where you can customize, such as resize, hide, change the component's position and color.
- Page status - To avoid duplication of the pages, there is a feature to assign different status or caption to the same page if required
- Providing color solution - You can customize your personal color palette, automatically generate the page color of the current page, and manually absorb the page's color.
- Work in a team - With its collaboration feature, it's easy to work in a team now. Members can work together, edit, copy, review the design, which can be viewed by all the members in real-time. People can also share comments and open an efficient workflow to see status and comments and synchronize the progress. You can also assign ownership to members to delete and move items to maintain high security.
- Sharing - Once your prototype is final, you can share it easily with stakeholders, clients, or personal contacts by just sending the URL of your design. Users can also view the design in offline mode, which is a great feature.
