Three seasons of Sketch

We haven’t posted a community round up for a little while and, since then, Summer turned to Fall, Fall turned to Winter, and Sketch meetups have taken place all over the world. From Munich to Montreal and South Florida to El Salvador, our dedicated Ambassadors have been hosting events and workshops, sharing their knowledge, skills and love of Sketch with a diverse and enthusiastic community across the globe.

As 2018 comes to an end we’d like to take a moment to thank the incredible Ambassadors and their wonderful communities for all their hard work, love and support throughout the year. We’ve got big plans for 2019 to help the community grow and blossom. To celebrate another great year, here’s a roundup of the amazing Sketch events that happened in August, September, October and November, this year.

Sketch Meetups

Sketch MTL — Montreal

On August 7th at the Lightspeed Offices, Sketch Ambassador Fabien Laborie invited a group of over 65 designers to an evening filled with deep-dives into product designing for organizations of all sizes. The event explored the many different ways designers communicate with teamsand was a great success!

Sketch MTL don’t do things by halves so a week later they they hosted another meet up where 40 designers and creatives gathered at Intact Insurance to showcase projects they’ve been working on with the design community. This was the group’s second Sketch meetup, and it was the perfect opportunity for designers to get some great feedback on their projects, and enjoy some casual conversation about design.

Sketch & Design — Pune

On August 24th, a group of 20 designers had a great time learning about designing UI workflows for Sketch and how to use Overflow to create user flows with Sketchfrom Ashish Bogawat and Vishal Shelke from Kritii Design. This was the group’s first official meetup, and it was a great success! A special thank you goes out to Overflow and Kritii Design for sponsoring the event. Make sure to join the community to find out about their next meetup

Sketch & Design — Stuttgart

On September 3rd at a Sketch Meetup in Stuttgart, our Ambassador Katharina Clasen led a review of Sketch 51 as well asa discussion on Libraries, and encouraged everyone to join the conversation around how designers can benefit from the use of Libraries in their day to day work. This event was supported by our friends at Overflow. Our Stuttgart community meets monthly and they always have a blast, so make sure to join the group for more info.

Sketch & Design — Washington DC

Sketch’s own Galya Iliev, hosted an event with Meng To and his team at the hip offices of Optoro in Washington DC. The meetup was followed up by a full day advanced workshop that explored the power of Sketch and its vast plugin ecosystem. Meng shared the story of how he built Design + Code and revealed a few of his favorite Sketch tips and tricks along the way. Galya has plans for another great event in the DC area, so stay tuned.

Sketch & Design — Stuttgart

Our Stuttgart Sketch Ambassador, Katharina Clasen hosted another event in September where she shared her insights on efficient workflows and how to prepare your files for easier handoff to developers. Over 30 people attended this hands on event and were excited learn some best practices for organizing and structuring their design files.

Sketch & Design — North Florida

Sketch & Design North Florida held their inaugural meetup on September 5th this year — an introductory Sketch workshop by Erik Thorelli. Erik covered everything from the basics of Artboards and shape layers to creating designs, and even code workflows and plugins. With a great turnout and an enthusiastic audience, we’re excited to see what’s next for this new community! As a bonus the group uploaded their presentation from the event.

Sketch & Design South Florida — Sketch + Fajitas!

The fajita loving crew in South Florida held another event on September 6th, where a group of designers met at Ultimate Software to learn the basics of using Sketch. They also heard some super helpful tips from Marcelo Paiva, a local product designer, and Alden Spence from Abstract. Attendees learned about the benefits of using version control and branches to empower collaboration within large design teams. Special thanks goes to Abstract for sponsoring this meetup, and a shoutout to Olena and Monica who both picked up a Sketch license in the raffle! Congratulations! Sketch + Design South Florida holds events every first Thursday of the month, and this group has grown to over 270 members.

Sketch Meetup — The Hague

In early September the Sketch team headed to Spaces at the beautiful and historic ‘RedElephant’, in The Hague to eat, drink and talk shop with the local design community. We hosted an intimate meetup, where Sketch founder Pieter Omvlee showed off some of the awesome features coming up in Sketch 52, and attendees got to demo an early version of our next release. Thank you to everyone who came along and stuck around to talk afterwards. We had some great discussions and heard some brilliant suggestions for future versions of Sketch!

The following day Roy van Rooijen (DesignTools Network) and Javier Cuello (Nomadic Designer) ran a full day workshop focussing on building design systems and speeding up your workflow in Sketch.

Sketch & Design — Bogotá, Colombia

On September 12th, Ruben Avilah and German Hernandez from our Bogotá Sketch meetup hosted Julian Pinzon to talk about the tools and practices to help design and development teams work on agile projects without compromising quality or creativity. The Bogotá Sketch meetup group meets almost every month, so stay tuned for their next event.

Sketch & Design — Manila

Organizers Aldrich Tan and Kringle Garcia hosted their 3rd Sketch meetup in Manila on September 20 at Insular Life. The event focused on using Sketch to collaborate with designers, developers and other stakeholders on your product team. Guest speaker, Mark Lester Coscolluela Lacsamana shared his team experience at Kalibrr.

Sketch & Design — Florence

Our Florence Sketch Ambassador Ale Mastro organized his 9th Sketch Meetup in September. The event focused on Version Control and explored tools like Zeplin, Kactus and Abstract. events run on every third Thursday of the month at NANABIANCA. Check out the Meetup page and join a group of 430 Sketch designers to find out more.

Sketch & Design — Barcelona

Sketch & Design Barcelona kicked off the month of October with a session about design systems, hosted at Travelperk. Local designers Alfonso Morcuende and Luis Montoro from Realized explained how they approach problems in the creation of their System of Design Systems. They focused on creating abstract layers that help to better define design decisions. Check out the Barcelona group to find out about their next event!

Sketch & Design — Stuttgart

Katharina Clasen who organises our Sketch Meetup in Stuttgart, is definitely one of the hardest working Ambassadors out there, hosting her third event in three months on October 2nd. Guestspeaker Bertram Gugel introduced the audience to the world of design and prototyping with real data. Over 35 people attended this event at the College of Media.

Romandie Sketch Meetup

Now back in business after a short hiatus, Romandie Sketch Meetup organizers Lucien Langton and Vincent Delaleu hosted their second meetup for the digital design community in Switzerland at Seedspace la Praille! On October 11th, special guest Guillaume Coquoz discussed version control and design systems. Following this discussion, our Sketch Ambassador Lucien Langton led a discussion about whether or not designers should be responsible for building the back-end. A special thank you to Octree for contributing to the apéro.

Sketch Seoul Meetup

On October 16th, Product Designer and Sketch Ambassador Sangyong Lee led a Sketch seminar on the Google Seoul Campus. This seminar focused on design systems within Sketch, and also addressed how to land a Google internship as a Product Designer. Speakers included Jinho Jeong, a Product Designer and Jihoon Seou, a Design Intern at Google. You can check out the event over on Facebook.

Sketch & Design Rome

In October this year, the Sketch team joinedforces with our and his group Sketch & Design Rome to launch their first ever meetupat Talent Garden Roma! The whole team were in attendance to answer questions, discuss ideas and share a beer or two.

There were talks from Rome Ambassador Carlo Frinolli and Emanuele Macri from Nois3, and Bohemian Coding founder Pieter Omvlee shared some insights about the team behind Sketch and a roundup of all the new features in Sketch 52. It was an absolute pleasure to eat, drink and talk shop with the local design community in Rome, so thanks guys! This enthusiastic community will be meeting again very soon so keep an eye on the group to find out more.

Sketch Kyiv

On October 18, our brand new Meetup in Kyiv led by Katerina Drobot and Max Kukurudziak had a very successful first event! 80 like-minded designers gathered at the MacPaw office to hear Kira Laktionov, Automotive UX Designer at TomTom, share his expertise on user demand and the industry’s response, how asking the right questions can help designers improve the experience, and how decisions are made in car product design. The second speaker ofthe night was Dmitry Novikov, Art Director & Senior Designer at MacPaw, Ukraine, who shared some insights on how CleanMyMac X was created. Join the community to stay tuned for future events! #KyivSketchMeetup

Colombo Sketch App Meetup

The Colombo Sketch meetup held their first eventon the 25th of October, lead by Sketch Ambassador Atheek Ahamath at Dialog Axiata. Many topics were covered — from tricks and tips to the latest integrations. Speakers included Hasanga Abeyaratne, CEO and Founder of Amplifyn, Nalin De Abrew, Unit Manager and User Experience Manager at Dialog Axiata, and Mahesh Kavinda, User Experience Engineer. The community motto is “come to learn something new, or come to be inspired and make new friends,” so make sure to follow them to get the lowdown on their next event.

Sketch & Design Athens

Another awesome event was organized by Ambassador Theo Tsongidis with over 80 creativesin Athens at AKTO, a private design college. The first speaker of the night, Thanos Papavasileiou, discussed the process of creating an app in only 3 days, and how he overcame the challenges created with such a short deadline. The second speaker, Lamprini Zampou, presented how she uses Abstract to manage, collaborate, and version control projects in Sketch. The event was great fun, and the attendees had a blast getting to know each other after the talks! You can even check out a livestream video of the event.

Sketch App Meetup Göteborg

On October 31st, Sketch Ambassadors Sandeep and Patrik gathered a great group of creatives at the Sendify office to hear designers at Sendify, Minna Technologies and Telia describe how and why they need systemic design and the challenges around it.

Sketch & Design Bolivia

Sketch & Design Bolivia held their second meetup on November 6th at 360 Workplace with over 30 designers! Sketch Ambassador Carlos Collazos led a discussion about modern design tools, workflows, and Sketch integrations. The meetup was a huge success, and the community had the opportunity to share experiences, opportunities, and tools with each other.

Waterford Sketch & Design

The Waterford Sketch & Design meetup group held their very first meetup on November 8th this year,at ArcLabs Research & Innovation Centre. Guest speaker Stephen Cummins started a discussion about “designing in Sketch so developers don’t hate you”, and the second speaker, Sketch Ambassador Dave Hearn shared some great tips and tricks he wished he knew when he started using Sketch. The event was a huge success, and designers across Southeast Ireland traveled to attend. This event has been described as “a perfect mix of design and development discussion” so if that sounds like your kind of thing join the community to stay tuned.

Sketch & design — Glasgow

Also on November 8th, Kevin Githwe (Web Developer) took the stage in front of the Sketch Glasgow Community to discuss the importance of communication between design and development teams. At this second meetup for the Glasgow community, attendees took a look at Sketch 52, prototyping with InVision, and the importance of communication between design and development. The second meetup was small but mighty, and the group has already grown to over 100 members!

Sketch Product Design Meetup — Edinburgh

Sketch team members, Chris Downer and Daniel Duke hosted a huge meetup at Akva, Edinburgh n November 12th. Over 100 designers attended to hear Chris share some insights about working remotely and how to use research to inform design decisions. Guest speaker, Alexis Piperides from Overflow showed attendees how they can create beautiful user flows from their Sketch Artboards. The talks were followed by a Q&A session with Chris, Alexis and Bohemian co-founder, Pieter Omvlee as well as some lengthy design discussions over a drink or two. Thanks to everyone who came out to this official Sketch event. We’re planning to host more events in Edinburgh in the future so check out the group for updates

UX Design & Sketch South Bay

On November 13th, Philip Park from Samsung covered a number of motion design principles, and examples related to user experience in his talk at CA Technologies in Santa Clara. Motion design and animation have become significant proponents for user experience. As technology advances, applying motion has become more of a common practice to either solve problems or create a delightful interactive experience. However, it is important that it is applied in a manner that does not distract or take the focal point away from the user. This and more was the focus of his talk at the latest UX Design & Sketch South Baymeetup.

Sketch Meetup @ Points

For the inaugural Sketch Meetup in Shanghai, Sketch Ambassador Hanfei Xu, hosted an event where almost 40 designers met to discuss projects and designs they are working on.

Vienna Sketch App User Meetup

At Vienna’s Sketch meetup on November 20th, designers had the opportunity to review the ÖBB redesign case study from David Höller. Attendees discussed design news, and had a session on Sketch plugins! Meetup organizer Nathan Guo inspired more than 18 people to stand up and talk about their projects, including the Austrian National Railway website and many app designs.

Sketch & Design — Belo Horizonte

The Belo Horizonte community in Brazil met for the second time on November 21st at App Prova offices. Over 20 people came together to listen to a lecture on the topic of design handoff by Bruno Castro and how the time between design and development can be optimized.

Sketch & Design — El Salvador

On November 24th, Sketch & Design El Salvador gathered at Applaudo Studios to discuss designing for mobile apps. Luis Pinto from UX El Salvador led a follow-along workshop for Sketch, and explained how to optimize Sketch with plugins. Check out the Facebook event here!

Sketch Meetup — Munich

On November 27th, Sketch Meetup Munich, Ambassador Silvia Bormüller held a great event at AutoScout24’s new office. At this meetup, Silvia talked to designers and creatives about the new features in Sketch 52 as well as versioning and documentation. Guest speakers Maximilian Schmidt and Michael Ehrnböck discussed collaboration within teams. If you are interested in giving a talk, please get in touch with Silvia.

Romandie Sketch Meetup

On November 29th, the Romandie Sketch Meetup hosted their third event at Impact Hub Lausanne. Guest speaker Stéphane Cruchon led an interesting talk about how “Sketch is great, but what comes before User Interface Design?” After the talk, the crowd mingled and enjoyed an apéro!

More meetups around the world

On August 1st, Sashko Valyus hosted the second event in Lviv Ukraine and the crowd enjoyed talks by Slava Shestopalov on icons design in Sketch and Oleksandr Valius on the state of design. A few days laterour awesome South Florida community held their monthly event which focused on building a Design System from scratch.

On August 15th, Ruben Avilah and German Hernandez from our Bogotá Sketch meetup hosted Miguel Gómez of Parawebs to present on the whole cycle of designing for the web with optimization and SEO in mind.

Over 100 participants gathered at eToro’s offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, on August 22nd, to talk all about Sketch. The event featured three great speakers. Ohad Shalev shared tips and tricks that improve his day-to-day work and his favorite plugins. Guy Isacar, shared with the audience how he introduced Sketch into the company as the main design tool and how that has made a significant impact on their workflow. Adam Shriki took a deep dive into Sketch and how it helps him manage three different teams.

On August 22nd, Organizers Bradley Dush and Drew Gilliam kicked off his first Sketch meetup in Chicago. The event happened at the trendy WeWork Kinzie location and gathered over 20 people. What a great start to a brand new meetup in Chicago! A week later, our Sketch & Design — Mexico City community hosted their third event at Centraal, on August 30th. The topic of this meetup was Atomic Design and how design systems are implemented in designing real products and what value they bring to interface design teams.

For Sketch Montreal’s third meetup, 40 members came together at Intact Insurance on September 25th to review local design projects and spent time showcasing work, getting feedback from professionals, and learning new tricks! Three projects were introduced this week, including a crypto app, a Blueberry project, and a lunch cafeteria project.

On September 27th, the first ever Glasgow Sketch Meetup took placeat Frame Agency! During the meetup, Sketch Ambassador Gianluca Petraccaro introduced the community to Sketch with a brief history of web design and development, the importance of new design tools, and the role of Product Designer. Following the recap was an overview of Sketch and plugins that help improve every designers’ daily workflow.

The North Florida meetup group hosted another great event at Black Diamondin October. During their meetup, speakers Everett Hagan and Sean Collins discussed design systems — what they are, why they are made, and what makes them useful — and how you can make a design system in Sketch! The meetup was a part-workshop,part-demo, and the attendees brought laptops to follow along.

Back in October, Nathan Guo from our Vienna Sketch Meetup hosted the very first meetup in Vienna, Austria! At this event, attendees had a chance to talk about tips, tricks, and insights using Sketch — as well as tools that go beyond Sketch. Congratulations to Alejandro and David on winning the Sketch license raffle!

On October 16th, Design and Prototyping met at SALT in Galatato discuss speed elements in digital design and how to improve overall user experience with creative problem solving. Alaa Alnuaimi and Melike Pınar Ulupınar of -99design studio were the speakers at this event. Speaker and Ambassador Alaa Alnuaimi covered useful tricks for impactful mobile design, and speaker Melike Pınar Ulupınar covered design tools, how to do more with less, and solutions to common issues faced in the design process. This was their biggest meetup to date, with more than 60 attendees! The organizers plan to bring Sketch, UI and UX to Turkey’s top universities and start educating future designersby having more such events! Sign up so you’ll be kept up to date on their next one.

A few days laterat Kirk Agency, Move2Sketch exchanged, collaborated, and reflected on ideas and topics related to Sketch, workflows, plugins, and more! Attendees enjoyed pizza, beers, and overall positive vibes at this rendezvous!

On November 20th, the Sketch Prague meetup crew met at Avast Software to discuss “evilanimation” in a talk led by Ivan Floreš from MotionHouse and to learn from Miki Nemce about how to land jobs with large companies as a Freelance Designer. A special thank you goes out to our sponsor, INLOOPX.

Sketch & Design — Mexico City met at Centraal, on November 30th, to talk about handoff tools and design systems. Lalo and Adrian from Ment were invited to speak at this meetup! A special thank you to the sponsors of this event—Centraal Academy, Synapbox, and 23 Design.

November’s meetups also included two more events from some of our hardest working groups Sketch + Design South Florida and Sketch MTL(Montreal)! You guys are on fire!

Sketch Workshops

In September, Sketch Ambassador Katharina Clasen hosted an Advanced Sketch workshop as well as a Beginner’s Sketch workshop in Stuttgart, Germany and taught designers how to take full advantage of powerful features in Sketch. In her beginners workshop she focused on how to go from wireframe to screen design in Sketch. While in her advanced workshop Katharina discussed flexible layouts and Sketch Libraries and how they enable the use of design systems for a better and faster design workflow. Katharina is thinking of hosting more workshops in the future, so make sure to sign up for the group to stay tuned.

On September 14 and 15th, Over 150 people attended a two day Sketch and Design event in Porto, Portugal filled with workshops and inspiring speakers on the topics of design, UX and Sketch workflows. The event was organized and hosted by EDIT.

On October 10th, UX Design & Sketch South Bay organized an evening of insights, knowledge, and stories from in-house and agency recruiters who have helped place designers at some of the most desirable companies in the world, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Intuit, Microsoft, Nest, Pinterest and more. Moderated by Albert Tan in a panel-style format, the crowd heard candid perspectives on a variety of topics, from understanding what companies really look for to tips that can help designers be more successful when chasing the hottest roles.

Sketch Ambassador Carlos Alberto hosted a Sketch App Crash Course in Barcelona, Spain on October 16th. His workshop was designed for beginners and experienced designers who are used to working with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. Attendees learned basic and advanced techniques for using Sketch.

A growing community means a growing team

The Sketch Community is growing fast and we’re over the moon that more Ambassadors are starting groups and hosting their first events every day. In the last few months groups in Chicago, Pune, Rome, Kyiv, Colombo, Shanghai, Seoul, Zurich, Waterford, Recife and Zagreb have all held their first ever meetup events!

To keep up with our growing community we’ve added two new Community Managers to our team and we’ve got some really exciting plans in the pipeline for the new year. We’re so grateful to the talented and dedicated Ambassadors who work hard to make our Sketch community what it is and we’re so excited that it’s getting bigger every day.

Find events near you or host your own

Make sure to check out the Sketch Community page where you’ll find more information about upcoming events all over the world. If there’s no events near you, you can also get in touch to start a meetup in your area. If you’re passionate about design and want to build a community around it, then we’d love to hear from you.

Sketch meetups are happening all over the world in the new year. Check out the list below and keep an eye on our Meetup page to find out when events are happening in your area.

• 🇮🇳 January 4 — Coimbatore, India
• 🇺🇸 January 8 — Santa Clara, California, United States
• 🇺🇸 January 10 — Miami, Florida, United States
• 🇵🇱 January 15 — Warsaw, Poland
• 🇦🇹 January 15 — Vienna, Austria