The Pain of Managing Typography in Sketch

Tom Dell'Aringa Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 14, 2017

Typography in Sketch: Illustrated

In my role as strategist at Allstate Insurance, one of my key initiatives is guiding our team through design exercises as we look forward to redesigning our flagship mobile app, Allstate Mobile.

It’s a huge task. Our app is large and complex, with many different types of flows and hundreds of screens.

I began my career as a graphic designer, and spent years in applications like PageMaker (and later, InDesign), QuarkXPress, and Framemaker designing both marketing materials and technical publications. Typography is an extremely important element of a well-designed publication, and the applications in which we worked had robust typography tools.

Fast forward to today, where we work in a Sketch > Zeplin pipline in UX. Let me tell you, trying to manage the typography of a large and complex financial services app in Sketch is an exercise in frustration.

What do we need?

Scaleability and maintainability.

For text styles that are applied across hundreds or even thousands of screens, we want to make sure we don’t have to manually make updates when the definition of a style changes. We don’t want to have to do that as UX practitioners, and we don’t want our development team to have to do that either.

While we don’t need Sketch to have the typography abilities that InDesign does, we need Sketch to do much better than it’s doing now.

Let’s Illustrate the problem.

Let’s work with one, simple style and see what happens when we need to make changes or variations. Consider a Title text style that would be used hundreds (possibly thousands) of times across your app or website:

Our basic style

Our Title style is being used for an Android Material Design app. It’s 20sp, blue, and left aligned. We’ve made a text style for it in Sketch and named it, surprisingly, Title.

Our Title Style

Let’s say we need a variation on this style. We’ll need a second version that is centered, and set to 50% alpha. So we apply a couple of overrides.

We don’t make a new text style, because we are trying to keep our text style set manageable (keep this important point in mind.) And since the override is merely a variation on the first, the logical assumption is that if I modify the base (let’s say I make it green) then the variation would accept the update and hold onto the overrides.

Ok, let’s see what happens. I make the change to the Title style in the panel, changing the color to green — no other changes.

It’s not going to be easy being green.

What happens to our variation style?

Oops. That is not what we wanted. So everywhere we used the variation in the app/website has lost both the alignment and alpha override. What does that mean for us?

That means we have to manually go and find every single instance of that variation and do it all over again.

It also forces us to make a new text style for the variation so that doesn’t happen.

Text style mania.

Remember I told you to keep the idea of keeping our set of text styles manageable? Sketch has just forced me to make another text style for my variation on my Title. But let me ask you the following questions.

How many colors do you use for text? A primary, secondary and maybe some grays?

How many alpha versions of colors do you use for things like hint text, disabled items and so forth?

How many variations on alignment, leading or paragraph spacing?

Do you have styles that need borders or other special features? Heck, we haven’t even mentioned buttons and control texts.

I think you see where this is headed. You’ll need a separate text style for every single one of those instances. Yeah, that’s going to add up fast.

It’s already unmanageable, and we just got started.

For Allstate Mobile, we’ve torn down our typography and started from scratch. We’ve considered the typography guidelines for both Material Design and iOS as a baseline for each system.

So for the 12 fundamental styles we have (right now at least), with our colors of black, primary and secondary brand, a reverse, and a base gray, we’ll have 60 text styles to start with on our redesign.

Sixty.

That doesn’t take into account any variations.

How should it work?

We are talking web and apps here, not large print publications. While some might desire it, it’s hard to argue we need that robust of a system. Be design, apps and websites should adapt to the device and the person using it. But we do need something better than we have now.

Let’s look at the same example in InDesign. We make a Title style with a variation.

And what happens when we make the change to the original style?

Ah ha! The overrides remained intact. The second version that had an alignment and alpha override understood that the base style had changes, and applied those changes — namely, a new color. But it did not lose the variations.

This would be greatly helpful in Sketch, because we wouldn’t need to make so many text styles to keep our files and styles manageable. And we would be able to make changes to the core styles without having to manually go through hundreds of instance to update them.

This would be especially useful in things like table rows/cells, where you have multiple alignments and colors of text that is the same size.

But wait, there’s more.

We haven’t even discussed character styles yet. Feel that migraine coming on? I do.

Yes, Sketch has a rudimentary way to modify a character/word within a text element. Select a word or words, and right click to get a contextual menu:

I can make things bold, change colors, etc. I can also use the gear in the properties panel to do some things:

But NONE of these changes can be applied as a style. You can’t save them. Want a style to apply bullet lists? Can’t do it. Want a character style for bold, italic or disabled text. No dice.

While that is a secondary problem to the main one discussed here, it’s still a problem. Having character styles would go a long way toward making things more manageable as well.

What’s the solution?

On the surface, when you are building your app or website, this may not seem like such a big issue. You make extra styles, you do your overrides and you get things done.

But we’re not doing our jobs if we are “just getting things done.” We need to be thinking about how to update and maintain our apps in a manageable way. And we’re not doing our jobs if we are not being good parters with our development friends. Because a well organized and manageable text style system benefits them, too.

Right now, our solution is to be as concise and organized as possible with our new design direction. But as I said, even doing that has given us sixty styles as a baseline, and we are just getting started.

I don’t know what the ultimate answer is without significant changes from Sketch. But it’s time we as a design community called out the problem more publicly. Because emails and social posts toward Sketch have largely fallen on deaf ears (so it seems.)

What are you doing to solve this problem?

The bigger question is, what are the folks over at Sketch doing to solve it?