Design sharing made easy

Sketch is professional digital design for Mac. It’s focused on building user interfaces for web and mobile, ideal for the work that we carry out at Awkward. We were given the opportunity to expand on Sketch’s vision and improve Sketch.

It’s very common for a designer to work directly with clients, customers or external coworkers. This usually involves the sharing of work in progress. In Sketch’s case: documents. Formerly there was no direct way to share your Sketch documents externally. We’ve changed that with the introduction of Sketch Cloud.

Sketch Cloud is an exclusive design sharing feature to complement Sketch. It’s directly integrated in Sketch, in contrast to plugins that are used as optional extensions. Sharing is as simple as pressing one button: Cloud. Sketch recognizes if an artboard changes and if so, it will only upload the updates to this file which ensures a fast workflow. Sharing a document will generate a short URL that presents all your Sketch artboards in the browser. A personal account system will even store your files in the cloud.

Sketch Cloud was built to cater many users and is prepared for an enormous amount of traffic. To efficiently deal with that sort of traffic, we decided to use a serverless infrastructure based on AWS, Lambda and API Gateway. The advantage is that we didn’t have to worry about the infrastructure, but could focus on code only. This configuration ensures the performance users expect from Sketch.

Working on a product that you’re using on a day-to-day basis is an incredible feeling. Sketch Cloud is featured in Sketch and is available on sketchapp.com.