Technique: Sketching, UX Design, UI Design.
What is Sketch Cloud nowadays?
Sketch Cloud is great for sharing designs, getting feedback and distributing Libraries, but uploading and opening documents can sometimes slow down the process of a designer. That’s the reason why Sketch launched Cloud Documents — a way to create, save and open documents from Sketch Cloud, right in the Mac app.
It starts with a new Welcome Window, where you can view and open any of your documents saved on Sketch Cloud. You can choose whether you want to create Cloud or local documents by default. Cloud documents regularly and automatically save locally as well, so you won’t have to worry about losing your work. When you want to save the latest version to Sketch Cloud, simply hit save. This is just the start of the plans to bring Sketch Cloud and the Mac app closer together. At that point, I started working for Sketch Cloud.
Organize your documents with Projects
Projects are a simple way to organize your documents on Cloud by a client, job or any other grouping that suits you or your team. Being able to view and collaborate on all of your team’s documents in a single, shared workspace is one thing. But what if you’re working on designs for multiple clients? Or multiple products? That’s where Projects come in and be a great solution where a lot of users asked for. I started my design process by creating different sketches with all kinds of ideas I had. How could we show Projects within our Cloud environment?
While I was sketching all the ideas and with the feedback from other designers and developers we chose to go for a fixed sidebar to the left. Here we could show the projects, but also other sections as shared with me. But the most important reason is that I wanted to keep the focus on the content and not on the navigation. I believed that the sidebar is the perfect solution to this problem. In this sidebar, you can switch between Projects. You cannot collapse the sidebar, so it will always be visible. The sidebar has the same styling as the Document sidebar on the artboard overview and Comment sidebar on the artboard detail view. With Projects, you’ll be able to organize your work by client or product (or any other grouping that makes sense to you and your team) and filter your documents in a new sidebar menu.
Move Document between Projects
For the first version, I wanted to support moving a document within Teams; to another Project or out of all Projects and thereby making it an orphan (None). As a user, you can also remove a document from a project. It will be still available in All Documents but not in that specific project anymore.
If you’re in a project and you click on the settings icon of a document, you now also remove a document (from the project). We will show a modal with the text: Are you sure you want to move ‘Document name’ to All Documents.
Versioning
For a lot of teams, it is important to track every design iteration with built-in, automatic versioning, and even download or roll back to older versions of a document. Especially when there are a lot of different people added to the team. The versioning is a feature that is really important to have one source of truth instead of a lot of different versions from one file.
In the document sidebar, there’s a new section called Versions. Here you see all versions of a document. The newest version is shown at the top of the list with versions. Each version has its own URL. When you click on one of the versions in the document sidebar you will see that version of the document. In this case, the version you’re looking at will show active in the document sidebar. And the URL has changed to this specific version URL, so when you share that URL they will see that specific version of the document.
Prototype
Next Steps
Right now, you can comment on specific Artboards, but Sketch will be adding the ability to comment in context with Annotations. For developers, Sketch is bringing an Inspector to Cloud so you can grab code, view specs and download production-ready assets, without having to open the Mac app.
After a while, Sketch also added the same feature as Figma: real-time collaboration between designers.
© Portfolio by Bart