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Henrique Ourique
Lingo Sketch Plugin — A design system manager for Sketch
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Manage your Sketch design system with the Lingo Plugin.

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Henrique Ourique
Maker
Hey hunters! 👋 My name is Henrique Ourique and I’m a Product Designer at Lingo. We’re thrilled to introduce our plugin for Sketch which allows designers to establish, use and evolve a fully customizable shared design system. At Lingo one of our jobs is to help design teams ensure consistency at scale. We do this by enabling them to build a central design library that is usable by their entire organization. Until now, Sketch assets weren’t supported which meant designers had to manage a separate library just for UI components. This created multiple sources of truth, making it harder to ensure consistency. Not anymore… By supporting Sketch assets, designers can add Symbols, Text Styles, Layer Styles, Artboards, Groups and Layers to Lingo, thus ensuring everyone consistently uses the same components. Support for Sketch assets is only the beginning. Through research we learned that it is impractical to build and update an interconnected design system one component at a time, so we made sure the plugin is smart about these “connections” and allows designers to perform batch actions. This means “connected components” can be added or updated together, resulting in a more efficient workflow. You can read in-depth about the plugin and its features on Medium: https://medium.com/lingoapp/a-de... We'll be here throughout the day answering your questions. 😉 P.S. If you were part of the public or private beta, thank you so much for all your feedback! This release wouldn’t be possible without you.
Olivia Isaacs
As someone rather new to the whole Sketch ecosystem, can someone explain to me how this differs from the library feature of Craft?
Henrique Ourique
Maker
Great question @scaasic! Both Lingo and Craft offer a shared library feature, ensuring everyone pulls from the same design language. Lingo however offers a set of features not available in Craft [I believe]. In Lingo you can: • Customize how your design system is presented by reordering assets, adding inline notes where needed and creating different sections for each component type. • Manage people’s role and access to the different kits in your library – Admin and Member with or without edit privileges. Lastly, the Lingo plugin for Sketch is equipped with a feature we call smart updates which allows you to update “connected components” together thus ensuring your design system remains globally cohesive and up-to date. To put this into context, here’s what happens behind the scenes when you change a few components: 1. The plugin compares the components in your document with what’s in Lingo 2. The plugin figures out if the changed components are nested within other components 3. The plugin shows you a visual diff of the components you changed alongside other components that are affected by your changes (e.g. You update a button and it affects a card component) As far as I can tell this feature 👆 is completely unique to Lingo and its plugin. Hope that answers your question. ----- For further reading on the customization offered by Lingo, check out these 2 articles: • https://medium.com/lingoapp/reth... • https://medium.com/lingoapp/asse...
Stephen Inoue
A much needed gap in Sketch is filled with Lingo. Have you looked at licensing the NounProject API? It would give you a good curated set of SVG icons that can be used for mockups and as final icon art for the finished app (licensing taken care of). Any thoughts about creating a marketplace for sketch assets? If you can curate it and reward the designers you might have a huge new market on your hands!
Edward Boatman
Maker
@stepheninoue We have looked into using the Noun Project API because well.. we're the same team that built Noun Project ;) To your second point about creating a marketplace for Sketch assets - this is something that interests us...however we're not only thinking about Sketch assets. You can get an idea where our head is at by taking a look at the Lingo store. https://www.lingoapp.com/store/
Vlad Korobov
Is there a solution to get developer ready design system?
Henrique Ourique
Maker
Another great question! Thanks @vladkorobov To truly ensure consistency at scale, a design language must be consolidated and useful to everybody pulling from it. In other words, one single source of truth for the entire team. In its current form, Lingo is more useful to the people who need a visual/graphic manifestation of the design system – usually Designers, Product Managers, Marketers. However, Developers can find some value in code snippets and style attributes included in certain assets in Lingo. We know of course this is not enough and we believe Lingo should provide equal value to every user type. For this reason we’ve started researching ways we can bring the Developer’s workflow into Lingo. Even though we're still in a very exploratory stage, we believe there's a potential for Lingo to become not only a design system manager that is used as a reference for building features, but also one that outputs to the product itself. If you have specific thoughts on how this should work we’d love to talk! 💬
Vlad Korobov
@henriqueourique I would like that to be somehow integrated in recommended tool from you guis to build Design Systems as a little Wiki. And start the work to make this automatic somehow. At least you could build some pipeline like Designed, Developed, Documented