Description

A plugin for automated and mathematically precise optical adjustments in Sketch.

Optically makes it easy to align layers to visual centers, align edges with overshooting and scale layers to the same size.

Installation

Unzip the package and double click the Optically.sketchplugin file. The plugin will be installed to the default Sketch Plugins folder and will appear in Plugins tab in Preferences.

Sketch may need to be restarted for the changes to take effect.

Usage

Optically commands are available through Plugins > Optically menu in Sketch.

Align Horizontally to Centroid and Align Horizontally to Centroid move selected layers to their respective geometric center in either horizontal or vertical direction.

Overshoot Left, Overshoot Right, Overshoot Top and Overshoot Bottom offset selected layers to have the same overshooting areas on the left, right, top or bottom side respectively.

Make Same Size scales selected layers to the same weight (area) as the bottommost layer.

Some practical examples:

Please note that negative space should be considered when aligning. Otherwise, it may lead to inconsistent results. In the example above, boolean operations on some shapes were temporarily switched from Subtract to Union before aligning to centroids.

References

Some good articles on the optical adjustments.

1. “The Art of Eyeballing – Part III: Overshooting” by Fábio Duarte Martins
2. “Typeface Mechanics: 001” by Tobias Frere-Jones
3. “Optical Adjustment” by Luke Jones
4. “The PLAY button is not optical alignment” by Yuki Erqiudao
5. “Optical corrections in logo design” by Ian Paget

Optically has been featured on Sketch Extensions, Designer News (discussion), Sketch App Rocks! and Sketch Hunt.

Support

Support is available via vladmdanilov@gmail.com or @vmdanilov. Glad to help with any questions you may have regarding the design plugins.

If you are a student or a non-profit, contact me and you can have these plugins with 50% discount or even free depending on your situation.

Revision History

1.0.1 – 19 August 2016

• Fixed a bug with Optically menu not appearing
• Made adjustments to respect Flatten Bitmap resolution

1.0.0 – 2 June 2016

• Initial release

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Align to Centroid just offset an object?

You need to center align the bounding box of the object before using Align to Centroid command. This eliminates duplicate functionality and works for many more cases.