Sketch course for beginners

Welcome to the Sketch for beginners course! Ready to get started? Want to learn what to use Sketch for? We'll start right at the beginning and move together through the software, step by step.

Together, we'll create a full-page brochure. This includes covering all of the tools to get there and everything you need to know to get it ready for print.

Download Course Files

Sketch is a vector graphics editor, but it’s so much more than that. As you learn Sketch you’ll come to realise it’s actually a digital design platform that can be used for creating designs, prototypes, and developer handoff. 

Since its inception in 2010, the software has been adopted by many who were seeking an alternative to Photoshop for creating UI designs.

Before getting started, you need to get familiar with the lay of the land, so to speak, within the Sketch app. Let’s take a look at the features and tools at your disposal within Sketch. You can follow along by downloading the demo file mentioned previously called Financial App Dashboard Concept.

Layers are the building blocks of any design project in Sketch. Sketch for Mac includes several different types. Follow along as we delve into the varieties of layers including: 

• Artboard 
• Text
• Shape
• Image

As you learn Sketch, and you begin to work on projects, it’s only natural that in time you’ll amass quite a few layers. Thankfully, there are a few wants to manage your laters after you’ve created them. Dive into the specifics of how to group layers for easier management of your designs. 

Likewise, learn how to lock layers so they can’t be edited and hide layers to experiment with your design’s possibilities. 

This lesson is extremely important. After all, you’ll be moving, resizing, and aligning elements an awful lot in Sketch, so it’s vital you get the steps for doing so efficiently down in order to better manage your design projects.

Sketch has three features called called Guides, Grids, and Layout and they are used for resizing and aligning content. Let’s learn about each and its role to play in Sketch development. 

Text makes up the majority of the content you’ll use for your design project. That’s why having proper control over how your text looks is so important. Sketch offers robust text manipulation tools for resizing and adjusting text and text styles. Let’s learn how to use them.

There are many different types of shapes in Sketch. There are simple ones like rectangle and circles and more complex ones like polygons and stars. Follow along as we demonstrate how to add shapes and edit how they appear including fill color, styles, borders, and more. 

Similar to how changing a text style will affect every bit of text that’s adopted that style, so too will shapes be affected by altering their assigned layer styles. Creating layer styles can save you a lot of time when building complex UIs that will reuse elements repeatedly throughout.

You can add images to Sketch in a few different ways. From the standard drag-and-drop to using images as shape backgrounds, this lesson explores the finer nuances of using images in your designs. 

You can create hand drawn shapes in Sketch using the vector tool. Rather than drawing lines to create shapes you’ll be making points which will be connected automatically. Let’s take a look.

Boolean operations are great for creating complex shapes. But in Sketch, they’re fantastic for creating icons. This lesson explores what Boolean operations are and all the powerful things you can do with them. 

In Sketch, using Symbols is all about reusing content. And by doing that you’re actually speeding up your workflow. The nice thing about Symbols is that whenever you make a change to the Master Symbol, all the other instances will receive those changes automatically.

Smart Layout is Sketch is all about resizing a symbol automatically when the content inside of it changes and it accomplishes this by maintaining the same space between items. This lesson showcases how to use Smart Layout effectively with plenty of examples of how it works in real-time.

Once you’re done creating your design in Sketch (and before handing it off to a developer) you’ll need to export some assets, i.e. icons, images, etc. There are multiple ways to do this in Sketch, and we’ll show you the process in detail in this final lesson of the course.