14 DAY TRIAL // Bohemian Coding has released Sketch 3, the latest version of the company’s graphic design tool for OS X, adding a bevy of new features and tools to carry out UI/UX design in a professional environment, all for just $49.99 / €44.99.
Winner of an Apple Design Award and amongst the App Store's “Best of 2012,” Sketch is now the top paid app in the Mac App Store.
Version 3.0 offers new symbols for reusing elements in your design, redesigned Text Styles and Layer Styles, a redesigned inspector with quicker access to everything, automatic Slices, the ability to export layers directly, improved PDF, EPS, and SVG importing and exporting, an all-new presentation Mode, and improved bitmap editing, to highlight some of the most important changes.
Sketch 3 is optimized for Retina and non-Retina displays and includes new features tailored to the needs of web and UI designers, as well as icon designers.
Web and iOS design templates come standard, users can copy CSS Styles to clipboard, export areas on the canvas as images, use a 960 default grid with advanced options, standard Responsive Web Design Artboards, and more.
Icon designers get artboards (each with its own canvas), iOS Icon Templates, Pixel Grid, Pixel Effects (Gaussian and Motion Blur), the ability to round to the nearest pixel edge, and more.
“Vector tools and basic shapes are the foundation; whether you are designing icons, websites, interfaces or anything else,” Bohemian Coding says.
“Combine these into complex shapes with non-destructive boolean operations, leaving you free to edit them in the future, then apply advanced layer style options like multiple shadows, fills, gradients, noise, blending, background blurring, and more.”
“Brand new to Sketch 3, Symbols allow you to reuse entire groups of content in multiple places in your design,” the developer adds. “Think of interface elements such as buttons, headers and footers. Change them once, and they update everywhere in your document.”
Sketch supports both versioning and Auto Save, two backup features introduced by Apple with the release of OS X Lion and inherited by OS X Mountain Lion and OS X Mavericks later on. This eliminates the hassle of having to hit CMD+S all the time like a paranoid person.
Designers can sync their work across devices with iCloud and use the software in full-screen to eliminate distractions.
You’ll need OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or newer to download Sketch 3, as well as a 64-bit processor. The software is supported in English only.