Organizing colors in Sketch is a giant pain. Nothing lines up, everything overlaps. Unless your color system has exactly eight variants for each base color, you’ve probably felt this pain as well.
If I were to guess, I’d say your color palette looks something like this.
These are the colors we use in our design system at SalesLoft. Even though the colors are organized they still look like a mess.
A better implementation looks like this.
This is the exact same palette in the exact same order as the image above. The difference here is that we’re using transparent colors as fillers. The fillers take up the remaining amount of space and organize the palette. It gets rid of the chaos and provides a bit of order.
Alternatively, you could create fillers with black, white or any other color. However, I prefer using a transparent one, because the checkered pattern is distinctive. Also, I like to keep pure black and white in the top right of my palette. They frequently come in handy.
If you’ve already got your palette organized and need to add transparent fillers, it’s pretty easy. Create a square with a 0 alpha fill and hit the plus sign.
It should create a couple fillers that you’ll need to reorganize. If you’re starting from scratch, consider laying out a palette onto an art board before starting. Doing something like this should make it easier to figure out what goes where. Just remember that you’ve got eight color preset slots to fill.
A final tip—if others are working off this color system, consider exporting it for them. The Sketch Palettes plugin allows you to quickly import and export your color palettes.
As usual, if I’ve missed anything, let me know in the comments.
Sketch Version 55.2
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