Today we’re reviewing Sketch Manager 3-in-1 – a powerful component organizer plugin to help speed up your workflow.
While Sketch has made improvements to their Symbol / Text Style / Layer Style management system, there are still aspects we feel are lacking. Thankfully, Sketch Manager brings us the management system we realized we needed.
Disclosure – We’re providing affiliate links for Sketch Manager today, but we promise to give our full, unadulterated review of the app! We wouldn’t promote content we don’t believe in ourselves.
In addition because we are affiliates, Master Design does make a portion of the fees if you decide to buy products through our links.
Interested in the plugin? Check it out here.
Sketch Manager (the 3-in-one version) handles the following 3 categories. You can also download each section individually:
Symbols
Text Styles
Layer Styles
It’s meant to provide a cleaner, dedicated interface for managing all of these items. If you’re working on a smaller project, you might be fine using Sketch’s internal tool. But if you’re like me and endless pages of Sketch content… this might be a life saver.
Pretty straightforward, but the value it brings is amazing.
The main interface are columns for file management for all over your components. While sketch’s files are all in the left panel, this viewport gives you a chance to see the layers more clearly (with more tools at your disposal).
The left hand navigation is how you can access each of the different component types (symbols, test, layers, and settings).
once you’ve drilled down to a specific element, you get a nice view of some of the component details including an image.
My favorite data point is the number of instances of this component being used.
For every component type, you have a number of options at your disposal. Create folders, delete components, copy, and rename.
The best part? You can do nearly all of these actions in bulk!
Simply highlight a number of components and select your option. You can use the top bar or right click on the grouping.
One of my personal favorite features is the ‘Edit Master’ button once you have a particular symbol selected. This button will take you to wherever the symbol exists in the document.
The plugin is pretty straightforward itself, so there isn’t a whole lot to customize. But thankfully you can load in external libraries which is immensely helpful.
You can also manage your license, check which version you’re on, and send feedback if need be.
Sketch Manager offers a trial version (Yay!) So you can test everything out before committing.
We reviewed the combination plugin, which has all 3 of his separate management tools melded into one.
However, you can buy the Symbol, Text Style, and Layer Style options separately if you only need one of them.
Each plugin is a one-time purchase of $20, or you can get all three at once for $50.
So far, we haven’t seen a comparable app that makes it this easy to manage your components.
Personally, I’ve had to use a scattering of apps just to even get some of the functionality that is in this plugin. And, while those were free, they’re not always compatible, and you have to manage multiple files.
If you’re a solo designer, it might be a hefty sum to tack onto Sketch’s yearly fee – but if you deal with LARGE files, and are aching to make your workflow more efficient, this is honestly a real bonus.
For larger teams with larger budgets, this plugin is a steal. It’s all the functionality Sketch honestly needs in its base application, but Jaer did it neater, better, and faster. For someone like me working on nearly 6 different UI engagements a year with varying levels of complexity, something like this is going to enhance my workflow no doubt.
First we’d like to thank Jaer for bringing our attention to his plugin – I’m honestly pleased at finding out a slick and straightforward tool exists for its use case, and I’m more than glad to share it!
Designers are always about workflow management, and no doubt you’re already juggling an array of tools that work for you.
However if you’re in the market for a better way to manage your style components in your Sketch files, I can wholeheartedly recommend this app.
Thank you for taking the time to check out the review. Let us know if you have tried Jaer’s plugin, and what you think.
