I’ve always been big on organization, especially when it comes to design. I’m not so bad that a messy Sketch file makes me twitch, but I like to be efficient and I find it satisfying getting from point-A to point-B in the least steps possible. What you’ll find in my files are thoughtfully named layers and groups, symbols that work with overrides, intentional sizes and alignments, and structured artboard layouts. What you won’t find are useless layers, empty groups, or fractions of pixels. Everyone’s different, but this is what works best for me. Below is a free resource I created for other designers, my set up for easily customizing a branded apps, and a sample of other helpful tools I use.

WIREFRAME & MARKUP KIT

There are millions of great wireframing kits out there, but I found that many of them were not pliable or expandable enough for my liking. I decided to create my own and share it with the design community, you can find the file on Sketch App Resources and Sketch Repo. It may not be the most complete kit, but I paid specific attention to create symbols that were meant to be resized, adjusted with overrides, and generally customizable without breaking.

EASY CUSTOMIZATION

One product I worked on recently was a white-label tablet app. Third parties can drop in their logo, and customize the color palette to get a product of their own. Changing the logo is easy enough, but this app is geared toward young children, so there are a variety of elements with different colors. I needed an easy way to show customers options, before investing development cycles. To do this I first created a system for how and where all colors are used in the product — engineering followed this and set up variables in the code accordingly. Secondly, I used a symbol/mask/override process (just made that up, catchy eh?) in Sketch that would allow anyone to change each color just once, and see how it would effect the entire application. Take a look at the Sketch file and see for yourself.

HELPFUL PLUGINS

The Craft plugin for Sketch has a lot of great automation features, and with a little set up, it can be customized for many use cases. One aspect I use a lot is a combination of the “Data” and “Duplicate” tools. By creating custom data inputs (in this case book information), I can easily produce mounds of content that’s not just lorem ipsum.
Here are a few other Sketch plugins I use:

Runner — less clicks, more shortcuts
Symbol Organizer — cleanup that Symbols page!
Symbol Instance Renamer — maintain symbol naming
Artboard Tools — arrange, align, and select artboards
Automate — a whole bunch of crazy organization stuff