The Sketch Handbook

Everything you ever wanted to know about designing with Sketch on 376 pages.

About the book

With practical examples, ‘The Sketch Handbook’ will guide you through every aspect of Sketch in 12 jam-packed chapters. Based on the sample project “Visit Austria” – the loveliest places of the Central European country – it will teach you how to design a multi-screen mobile app, a responsive article with different breakpoints, a variety of icons, some fun projects and much, much, more. You will also learn about the most recommended plugins and get many useful tips, tricks and best practices.

Simply put, the book will make you a proficient user of Sketch.

Who is this book for?

Whether you are a beginner to design or just started to use graphical apps, ‘The Sketch Handbook’ will teach you anything you want to know about Sketch, the best UI design app available. Also, if you have used other apps, like Photoshop or Illustrator, before and want to try out something easier, you should have a look at the book. Even if you are already an intermediate Sketch user, you will find plenty of tips and tricks in this book you didn’t know.

It (The Sketch Handbook) has been extremely useful and certainly worth the investment. The tools you recommend and the tutorials were simply invaluable. I would say that your book should be a necessity in any current UI design course.

Robert K.
I just wanted to let you know that I'm enjoying your book [...] I'm a designer and developer with decades of experience and I appreciate - require - the level of detail you provide plus your opinion about how best to use the application in practice.

Iain Houston
Most tech books focus on technique, with examples are difficult to relate to. Christian Krammer really gets it. The Sketch Handbook is instantly useful. I’ve been doing user experience for 19 years and this book gave me a whole new (and better) workflow. My highest recommendations.

Dave Linabury
I learned so many practical tips about Sketch in your book! Plus the project orientation helped me think about bigger issues, such as layer organization, managing responsive design, etc. It's often hard to pull those ideas out in a book that's organized more around individual capabilities of a tool.

Amy Travis
The organization (there I go again) is superb, as he steps you through creating various design elements, screens, and apps. [...] I think Christian has covered just about everything you need to know about Sketch and I would consider this the definitive guide.

Gary Bastoky
I am by no means a designer, but at the time I opened your book, I was in search of inspiration. And your book just did that: its numerous real-life examples energized me and spurred my desire to play with Sketch, just for fun.

Pierre Arnaud
[...] I bought the e-book, I think its excellent. Detailed breakdown of all the features particularly Symbols and Responsive.

Jamie McCue

About the author

Christian Krammer is a web-designer and Sketch app pro. He has run the site sketchtips.info now over almost three years and has published countless tips and tricks about Sketch on that site. Christian also released two Sketch courses on Skillshare. When he’s not fiddling around with Sketch, he loves to spend time with his family or watch a good movie. Follow him on Twitter for some great Sketch tips.

1. An Introduction To Sketch

The first chapter gives you a compact overview of the most important features of the design app, as well as an introduction to the interface of Sketch. Mainly, you will get a short peek into its best features: Read more

Topics covered:

About the author, Interface basics, Sketch basics, Bitmaps vs. vectors
2. Design An App

Based on the app “Visit Austria” that Christian has designed for the book, you will learn the basics of Sketch. The app is all about the most beautiful places of Austria, Christian’s homeland. Read more The first screen we tackle is the details page. Everything starts here with the artboards which give your design a defined space. After you have added the first elements and text layers, you can read how to style them and change their properties. This includes an overview of the available shapes and fill types, as well as the usage of images. With the first layers appearing in the layers list, it’s also important to learn the best way to organize them. Lastly, you will employ an 8-pixel grid, that gives the design some structure and avoids random placement of the elements.

Topics covered:

Artboards, Designing at 1x, Shapes, Smart guides, Layer manipulation and organization, Fill types, 8-pixel grid, Colors, Opening and closing shapes, Dashed and dotted lines
3. The Power Of Iterations And Artboards

A design is never finished, so we will use artboards to evolve its elements and try out different ideas. With it you will learn about a very important topic: Read more symbols and shared styles, that allow you to reuse elements and keep them in sync. This chapter also comes with some advanced techniques, such as masks, shadows, gradients, and boolean operations. The latter are especially important, as they let you combine basic shapes to form complex objects. This is also the first touch point with plugins to enhance Sketch. To round things up, we will have a look at how easy it is to recreate an icon in the design app.

Topics covered:

Artboard organization, Image fills, Symbols, Customize the toolbar, Aligning layers, Custom shortcuts, Masking, Zooming, Shared styles, Undo and redo actions, Plugins, Icon creation, Shadows and blurs, Gradients, Fill types continued, Distribute content, Boolean operations, Pixel precision
4. Create A Logo For The App

In this chapter Christian will show you his approach on this important branding asset. You will not only learn how to create a logo, but also how to generate ideas surrounding it. To separate the logo from the rest of the app, we will set up our first page. Read more Pages allow you to have all the related parts in one file, but everything still has its own area. The logo creation process involves a great deal of vector manipulation. Here you get an overview of the different point types and their specialties. Most of the times you don’t even need to create a vector from scratch, but you can manipulate a basic shape instead. See how easy it is to achieve that. With the completion of the logo we will also finish the details screen of the app, as the logo was the final missing element.

Topics covered:

Pages, How to get inspired, Types of vector points, Vector point mode, Create custom vectors, Manipulate text, Kerning and tracking, Scale layers, Layer management
5. Create The Overview Page

The app we started in the second chapter not only consists of a detail screen, but also of an overview page with a list of more lovely places. Now, a new options bar is introduced, containing a handful of different icons. Read more Although there are a zillion icon packs out there, we will create all the icons by hand, as it is the perfect way to apply all the skills you have already learned while also acquiring some new ones. These include nested symbols and the usage of rotations. But this chapter is not only about icons, you will also learn how to create the list of entries for the sights to visit in Austria and, as an alternative, a card view. The Craft plugin from InVision plays a big role here.

Topics covered:

Nested symbols, Advanced icon creation, Layer styles, Black is never black, Rotations, Transformations, Duplicate content, Rulers and guides, Pasting, Design with real data (featuring the Craft plugin), Create color variations
6. Exporting

This chapter is all about one of the strongest features of Sketch: Exporting. After a bit of setup basically all you need to do is to press a button to export all your different assets. Read more Christian will not only show you how this setup process works on a general basis, but also demonstrated on an explicit example of iOS and Android assets. Again though, this chapter is not only about exporting. You will also learn how you can preview your designs on real devices, which alternatives there are to Sketch, how the design app works together with prototyping tools, and how you can successfully use it for print projects, as this is not a tool limited to digital design. Lastly you will gain information about the workarounds you can use to make your developer friends on Windows happy.

Topics covered:

Exporting options, File formats, Save space, Multiple export, Exporting iOS and Android assets, Device preview, Collaboration, What about Windows?, Printing, Alternatives, Prototyping tools
7. Design The Article Page

Mobile is growing like crazy, but it’s not the only way to consume content. There are still a myriad of other devices with larger screens, so we take a look at how to display information on those in this chapter. Read more

Topics covered:

Grids and layouts, Baseline grid, Text and borders, Adding content with the Craft plugin, Choosing font sizes, Text options, Tracking, kerning and ligatures, The optimal reading experience, Add a drop cap, Images, Image manipulation, Text styles, Maximize available space, Blending modes, Duplicate content with Craft, Nested symbols, Layer order

8. Going Responsive

A modern website doesn’t consist of a single width alone. With responsive web design in mind, you need to create multiple breakpoints where the layout can adapt to the new screen width. Read more While it’s not feasible to create all of them in Sketch, we will still have a look at a few different widths to see how possible adaptations might look. Luckily Sketch lets you define how elements react when they are resized. With a little preparation, you just need to adapt the parent container and everything changes accordingly. For some variation we will also alter the appearance of some of the article’s elements. Finally this chapter you will give you some important tips and tricks on how to best adapt the font sizes from one breakpoint to another.

Topics covered:

Designing with constraints (group resizing), Responsive grid, How to go from one breakpoint to another, Adapt content with Craft
9. The Final Breakpoint: Desktop Widescreen

Even with the rise of hand-held devices desktop computers will probably not go away anytime soon. After the first two breakpoints are finished, this final version takes a look at how the available information can be arranged on a widescreen display. Read more Unfortunately the foundations under which we set up the grid earlier, don’t fit the increased screen size anymore. Therefore, we need to adjust the grid in the first step. This is also the perfect opportunity to adapt most of the elements of the article to this new grid. However, this chapter is not about the responsive article alone, but Christian also shows you how to prepare the details screen of the app so that it can adapt to different device widths.

Topics covered:

Designing with constraints (group resizing), Responsive grid, How to go from one breakpoint to another, Adapt content with Craft, Make the app responsive
10. Design The Category Icons

For this chapter, Christian has created four different icons, that each sight falls into. The premise for all of them is to use basic shapes as often as possible instead of custom vectors. Read more While it may be seen as a restriction at first, they are much easier to set up and modify this way. Also, they can still be combined into complex shapes with boolean operations. To guarantee maximal efficiency, keyboard shortcuts are used wherever possible. Finally, a strict grid ensures that all elements are placed on full pixels, leading to a pixel-perfect result. With this, the chapter is clearly geared towards more advanced users.

Topics covered:

Advanced icon creation, Icon creation workflow, Grids, Pixel perfection, Efficiency with keyboard shortcuts, Vector manipulation, Boolean operations, Pixel preview, Layer duplication
11. Export The Category Icons

The category icons are finished, but the work is not done yet. This chapters focuses on their optimization: on one hand, the icons can be used in different forms. On the other hand, we will slightly adapt some parts so they can be exported in an optimal way, with a small file size in mind. Read more

Topics covered:

Icon export workflow, Which format to choose: SVG or PNG, Optimize icons for small file size
12. Mini-Projects

By now the book has covered most of the aspects of Sketch and you should be able to apply this knowledge and build everything you can imagine. However, there are still a few topics left that are either not immediately obvious in Sketch or imply a certain technique. Read more In this course we will take a deeper look at some topics we have already touched, but in a less formal way. Consider these as “design snacks” of sorts: fun projects that let you play around in Sketch. You will learn how to create a realistic clock, five different versions of pie charts, textured type, a round progress bar, and some logos. If you are already an intermediate user of Sketch, this is the chapter for you.

Topics covered:

Create a realistic clock, Create textured type, Create pie charts (five different methods), Create a round progress bar, Create some logos, Advanced shadows, Multiple borders and gradients, Rotations, Rotate copies, Masks, Image and pattern fills, Blending modes, Advanced vector manipulation, Advanced border options, Text on a path, Create branding assets, How to account for missing fonts
And much more

Apart from the topics above, each chapter is jam-packed with dozens of quick tips and info boxes about various areas of Sketch and other design-related topics.

Topics covered:

Most recommended plugins, Valuable resources, Overview of the most important keyboard shortcuts, Special thanks

Buy the book now!

Available now as print book and e-book from

The Sketch Handbook

Everything you ever wanted to know about designing with Sketch on 376 pages.

About the book

Who is this book for?

About the author

Table of contents

1. An Introduction To Sketch

Topics covered:

2. Design An App

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3. The Power Of Iterations And Artboards

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4. Create A Logo For The App

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5. Create The Overview Page

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6. Exporting

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7. Design The Article Page

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8. Going Responsive

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9. The Final Breakpoint: Desktop Widescreen

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10. Design The Category Icons

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11. Export The Category Icons

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12. Mini-Projects

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And much more

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