Fathers — the ultimate sketch library
By: Grant Petrosian
Tags: Sketch

Hello everyone, it is my second note about design mess and how I think everything should spin. If you here for the first time, check out my first article.

This time we will talk about more complex problem — symbols and components (and yes, they are different things). In my view there are two parts of the problem we are solving one we could call “Be aware of complex symbols” and another is “Use components and reuse them”.

Let’s start with the first one, so:

Be aware of complex symbols

We all love symbols, they are really great and nowadays it is hard to imagine how did we build design without them. I remember those days, with illustrator or photoshop and early Sketch builds. Today you can create symbols, update them and all changes will be available to every instance of this symbol, awesome, really! But…

Some designers are so keen on symbols that they could build entire app screen using only 2–3 of them. Well on the one hand it looks interesting, all of them are always updated and without mistakes but on the other hand it is really hard to work with them, especially if you are not one designer in project. Ones I worked with a designer who builded a huge symbol with different states and substates and he could work around with it like a boss, but when did he leave our company and other designer started to support his project the war began. Just imagine how many overriders there were in Sketch inspector on the right…

What I want to tell is that try to think about a symbol and maybe you don’t need so complex element, keep it simple as hammer. But you could ask: “– Hey, if my symbol should me simple, how I will build my design faster? Do I need to insert every symbol again and again??”

Well not really, after so many projects and companies I came to really cool solution and we started to call it “Fathers” (I will tell later why).

Use components and reuse them

Fathers

So Fathers… it is a system which allows you to organise and build your designs fast, consistent and without mistakes. It even works better in designer teams. Let me explain it and later I will show some images of how it works.

Fathers is a sketch document with folders of every separate element in your design system. The philosophy of is that you need to open this document -> find symbol you are searching for -> copy it and paste in to your design file. That’s it, just copy&paste, but from technical side it works a little harder.

Structure

I have two library files: Styles and Components. In Styles I have all my fonts (both for iOS and Android), icons, colors and logos etc. In Components I build simple symbols using Styles data. And then, in Fathers I create an artboard for each component I want to use with just Components symbols. It is technical thing, because in Components document symbols are local and if you want to copy and paste them they will migrate to your actual design file. Thats why we need a third document Fathers where all symbols are linked, not local.

Why “Fathers”?? In Russian language word “Folder” is “Папка” (papka) and it is similar to “Папа” (papa) which means “Dad”. And because Fathers document contains so much Folders we decided to call it like this. Just for fun.

Result

As a result we have a document with all our components and you can just copy and paste it to any other design. Every symbol is linked to a library so if you want to change icon or color you can do it using overrides. More over, every folder has their own name, so you and developers always understand which component is using.

Plus

With new Sketch “Auto layout” feature it is so handy to set all paddings and every component will moves automatically.

Some screenshots from my actual documents:

Styles