Sketch 3.5 unleashed

Sketch aficionados will be excited to learn that there’s an update to their favorite app awaiting them. Today makers of Sketch, Bohemian Coding, announced the availability of Sketch 3.5.

Although the update is a minor release covering bug fixes and GUI enhancements—no enticing new features have been added—it is evidence of the tool’s growing maturity and Bohemian Coding’s commitment to perfecting the existing codebase before introducing new toys.

Most importantly, some of the bugs that leave many professional designers wary of Sketch have been resolved: images won’t be lost in between saving a document and reopening it, and you won’t have to keep deselecting the export size field before its value is applied to the export.

How Sketch (mis)handles typography is a key obstacle for many designers considering trialling the app for professional work, so it’s great to see some improvements on that front, most notably that line height now scales correctly along with text layers, and the list of fonts in a document now includes the fonts on every page.

Further useful additions include: artboard refinements; improved performance and rendering for complex operations; subpixel anti-aliasing deprecation; dragging a shape onto another shape in the layers list now triggers a union operation; and a new shortcut has been added for aligning layers to the pixel edge.

The first update since Sketch deserted the Mac App Store, the update is free, but you will need to transition your license in order to enjoy the new features, and bug-fixes. (To transition your license, you need to download Sketch direct from Bohemian Coding, open it, and then enter the email address associated with your App Store account. Bohemian Coding will then send you your license.) Sketch files aren’t backwards compatible, so if you’re working with others, make sure your whole team upgrades at once.

Ben Moss

Ben Moss has designed and coded work for award-winning startups, and global names including IBM, UBS, and the FBI. When he’s not in front of a screen he’s probably out trail-running.