Color Variables & Components view - Sketch 69 make life easier for you

After some time in beta Sketch 69 was released yesterday and it was a great release indeed. We finally got Color variables, which has been much requested. We also got the first taste of the components view which is a more structured way to manage all your assets. Finally we got a new insert window to make adding your assets into a design so very much easier and intuitive.

Color variable

This is amazing and I like this a lot, espcially combined with the Components view. For people who find it annoying or time consuming to turn your old layers and styles manually, there is a migration tool that you can use. It is called the Color Variables Migrator and it is of curse free to use.

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Whether you’re working on a one-off project, or managing a complex design system, keeping the colors you use consistent and up-to-date is important. And with Color Variables, we’ve made that a lot easier. They work exactly how you’d expect them to — you can apply them wherever you’d normally apply a solid color. And when you make a change to a Color Variable, you’ll see that update reflected automatically across every layer that uses it.

Components view

This, to me, makes working with assets a whole lot easier. I find that this in combination with the new insert window below make it faster and much more intuitive to work with assets now.

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Clicking on the Components View tab in the Toolbar will switch out the Canvas for a whole new view in your document’s window. There, you’ll see a grid with a preview of every Component in your document. From there, we’ve made it easy to organize them into groups, rename them, and even edit them in bulk using the controls in the Inspector. In other words, you no longer need to manually create a page full of text layers for the sole purposes of viewing and editing Text Styles.

Insert Window

This makes working with assets a pure pleasure. No more droplists to go through with barely visible icons. Instead we get a big, well organised window that you open when you need it pressing "C" where your assets are easy to find and you add them with drag and drop. I love it.
 

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As the name suggests, the Insert Window is a separate window, built specifically for browsing and inserting Components — from your local document or any Library you have enabled.

When you find what you need, simply drag-and-drop it onto your Canvas. The window hides itself when you do this so you can see the entire Canvas, but you can also pin it to have it reappear automatically.

 

This is one of the best updates this year to Sketch as I see it and I look forward to hearing more on the collaboration features they are working on next.