Few things are more daunting than a blank canvas, especially if you’re new to design or working on something outside of your comfort zone. That’s why Sketch now ships with over 200 beautiful, ready-made templates to help kickstart your next project.
We designed these templates in-house to cover a whole range of use cases. Whether you need to make a moodboard for a presentation, business cards for a client, an advert for Instagram, or give your design portfolio a long-overdue update, we’ve got you covered.
Let’s dive in and discover how they work, how to make the most of them, and how you can create your own templates to share with others.
Getting started with Sketch templates
Open up the Mac app and click on the templates tab in the sidebar of the Workspace window. From here, you can browse through the whole collection of templates. We’ve even split them up into categories to help you quickly find what you need.
When you find a template you want to use, double-click on it to start using it. Don’t worry, you won’t be editing the original template here. Instead, you’re looking at a fresh document with a copy of the template’s content, so you can make all the edits and changes you like, without affecting the original.
Editing and customizing a template design
We’ve built these templates to look great, while also not being overly complicated to work with. If you’re new to Sketch, you’ll find them quick and easy to use, but if you know your way around, you can edit every single part of them infinitely.
Editing text in a template is as simple as double-clicking on it and typing. We’ve embedded any fonts a template uses into the document itself, so there’s nothing extra for you to install and you won’t come up against any missing font warnings.
Our templates include beautiful placeholder images from Unsplash, but adding your own is as easy as dragging one from outside of Sketch and dropping it onto any placeholder. As you drag your image, we’ll show a border around existing ones to help you see exactly which image you’re replacing.
Taking your template edits further
We’ve deliberately added as few guardrails as possible to these templates, so you won’t find complex nested Symbols or hundreds of overrides limiting your creativity. If you want to change a color, though, we recommend updating the document’s Color Variables or using the Find and Replace Color menu to keep your changes consistent across the template.
If you want to completely customize things, you can edit, move, resize or delete entire layers to really make these designs your own. Just be careful not to resize Artboards on templates that you’ll want to export at specific sizes — like social media posts, for example.
Saving and exporting your template designs
When you’re happy with your edits, head to File > Save (or press ⌘S) to save an editable version of your design to your Workspace.` Then, head to File > Export (or press ⇧⌘E) to export final image files. Use the checkboxes to select exactly which parts of your design you want to export, hit Export, and you’re done!
Creating your own templates
Along with these beautiful, ready-made templates, we’ve made it possible to turn any document in your Workspace into a template that everyone else can use. It’s ideal if you have non-designers you work with who need to create quick brand assets, or if you want to make sure the designers in your team all follow the same page structure and core layouts.
How you set up your own templates is entirely up to you. You can enable document Libraries, make use of complex nested Symbols, pre-populate pages with Artboards and so much more. There’s a lot to cover here, so we’ve made a video taking you through some of the more advanced uses cases:
Whether you’re helping out a friend with some business cards, or leading a team and wanting an easier way to enforce some document consistency, we hope you’ll find these templates — and the ability to create your own — a useful addition to Sketch!
Whether you want to Mirror designs as you work on them, browse your Workspace on the move, or share feedback from the comfort of your sofa, our iOS app has you covered.
