SKETCH AS A KEY TOOL FOR DEVELOPING A DESIGN SYSTEM

Given that there’s no right or wrong way to use Sketch to develop a design system, it is always valuable to look at what designers do to evangelize the consistency and efficiency of design operations.

Sketch as the key tool for developing a Design System. On Tuesday, April 28th, the Sketch Meetup Zürich hosted a session with Matteo Gratton VP of experience at Barclays. Matteo walked us through his workflow based on Sketch. He showed us the whole process he and his team rely on to deliver a unique source of truth for building successful digital experiences.

Here are a couple of questions Matteo replied to during the session and we thought was worth fleshing them out in more detail:

What is the “must-have” plugin that needs to be included in your workflow?
I think a plugin must rely on the core tool features: it should not touch them in any way. I wouldn’t name any of those plugins (you can easily think of some of them, as they’re quite famous).
What a plugin must-do for me is to ease my workflow. Maybe with a combination of a few plugins, you can save hours of work and the pain of redoing the same action many times. I’d like to mention here some of them I’m used to using every day managing libraries, as the topic of our Meetup (Design Systems) is heavily based on them:

• Automate by Ashung Hung is a massive plugin with a huge number of features. What I use more often are the Layer arrangement options to reorder layers based on position and the Guide management options to copy and paste guides easily between Artboards. You can dig into the options, as there are options for almost any use.
• Free Flow by Francesco Bertocci. It is a daily evolving plugin that creates magic with the overrides for me. Like Automate, this plugin has many options.
• I often use the combination of Select Similar Layers by Wessley Roche and Rename It by Rodrigo Soares to reorganise and rename a huge number of layers in just a few steps.
• Symbol Organiser by Jason Burns. It is my choice to have the symbol pages well organised, ordered and readable.
  
  There are a few other plugins I’m used to using, but those are for managing my work with a Design System; those are the ones I use day to day.
  
  I want to mention here also that it’s possible to develop your own plugin. If you’re managing a Design System for a big company, you likely want to speed up the teammates’ day-to-day work. Developing a plugin could be an easy solution to deliver consistency and an easy approach to a complex system.
  
  

You mentioned several times your desire to convince people to follow the UI/UX guidelines available in the Design System. How do you evangelize this message?
This is probably one of the main goals of any Design Ops and Design System manager. To me, the most effective way to evangelize the proper use of a Design System is to make people aware of its complexities and to be part of the development of the system itself.
My answer would be something a bit far from the Design System itself: work hard to create a community around it—before it, within it. A system will help to create a shared language, knowledge, and even experience among different teams (Design, Development, and Product, at least). My starting point is to make it happen that those people would like to meet and create something together.
Within the Sketch libraries (it does not depend on the tool, as this is valid for any shared library, component, or code), I think that the main reason that would help people to stick to the Design System itself is the visible maintenance of it. If a new feature is released in your tool, you have to review the components that would benefit from it. If a new way to manage your code lands, you must review it accordingly. The people who would use your Design System as a service need to have it up to date to use it. Otherwise, they’ll fork it and edit it.
Remember: a Design System is a living entity. It does not stop to evolve. It does not have an endpoint (if you dismiss it for something else). It deserves to be developed and needs care!

The Sketch Meetup Zürich will shortly come with other interesting sessions on how to design successful digital experiences with Sketch

If you are a Sketch enthusiast or want to know more about it just hit the “subscribe” button on the Meetup page and stay tuned!

If you want to ask Matteo more questions, just leave a comment at the end of this post, and he will contact you!