The Atomic Designers recently got together to work on an internal project. One of my favorite things was seeing how my fellow atoms used their design tools. In particular, I learned a few new Sketch shortcuts and techniques to use. We have been using Sketch at Atomic for sometime now, and we’ve all come to enjoy using it.
In the spirit of sharing, I have compiled my newly updated list of most useful Sketch keyboard shortcuts.
- Presentation Mode – cmd + .
- View all artboards – cmd + 1
- Group Layers – cmd + g
- View/hide Layout – ctrl + l
- Move layers back/front – opt + cmd + arrow
- Color picker – ctrl + c
Presentation Mode
Presentation Mode lets you easily toggle hiding and showing the layers list, inspector, and the menu bars with one shortcut. I found this to be particularly helpful when working on my laptop because of the reduced amount of real-estate on the screen. It is also just nice to get the clutter out of the way and solely focus on the work at hand.
View All Artboards
I like to move quickly when using Sketch, and that means I accumulate a lot of artboards quickly. I love having an easy way to zoom all the way out to see all the iterations on the screen at once. It is also handy for making large screenshots.
Group Layers
This is a pretty standard command but a great one none-the-less. For some reason, I felt that my Sketch documents become disorganized more quickly than my Photoshop files. Enabling a quick grouping helps bring back order to my document structure.
View/Hide Layout
Who doesn’t like grids!? This keyboard shortcut toggles the Layout visibility so you can align your elements to the grid, then remove the grid for a clean view of your document.
Moving Layers
Moving layers was one of the most difficult shortcuts to get use to from the Adobe suite. Adjusting the layers is a very common task, and having to move your the mouse and manually adjust the hierarchy of the layers can be exhausting. Instead of re-mapping Sketch’s keyboard shortcuts, I took a couple weeks and learned their shortcuts.
Color Picker
Activating this shortcut will bring up the color picker, allowing you to select a color of a pixel on the screen to be used in your design. This was one of my favorite options in Illustrator, and now it’s easily available in Sketch too.
Other Helpful Sketch Resources
- A full list of Sketch short cuts – sketchshortcuts.com
- Sketch add ons: github.com/getflourish/Sketch-Style-Inventory/
- Great overview of Sketch features: designcode.io/sketch-learn
- More Sketch plug-ins: awesome-sket.ch/
What are your favorite Sketch Keyboard shortcuts?