How to set up your Sketch Workspace for teams — the definitive guide

With a Sketch subscription, you can get everything you need for your team included in one cost — so you can stop paying extra for third-party tools. With the Mac app, designers get all the powerful tools they need to design and collaborate in real-time. And with your Workspace, it’s easy for designers to share designs with other stakeholders in your team, so they can test prototypes and leave feedback. Then, once it’s ready, hand it off to developers — who can inspect designs and download production-ready assets from any browser, on any operating system.

Best of all, you only need to pay for people who need access to the Mac app — like your designers. You can invite stakeholders and developers to your Workspace for free.

Save money with Editors and Viewers

Today, the design process is more collaborative than ever before. So with Sketch, we’ve made it easy — and affordable — to involve everyone.

The people that participate in the design process at your company likely fall into two groups:

• Editors — Those who need to create and edit documents, such as designers or copywriters
• Viewers — Those who only need to view and inspect documents, like product managers and developers

With your Sketch Workspace, you’ll only pay for Editors. An Editor seat on your subscription costs $9 per month or $99 per year. If your design team’s size or structure changes, you can reassign those seats to new accounts at any point in your subscription. Which means you can finally say goodbye to the hassle of managing traditional license keys.

Today, the design process is more collaborative than ever before. So with Sketch, we’ve made it easy — and affordable — to involve everyone.

Once you’ve invited them to your Workspace, your designers will simply be able to sign in with their Sketch Account (instead of their license key) and access the Mac app, along with all the team’s resources.

Viewers can sign into the web app with their Sketch Account and browse all of the team’s designs. They can leave feedback, inspect documents for handoff and more — all for free. There’s no limit to the number of Viewers you can invite into a Workspace. So even if you have dozens of people involved in your design process, you’ll likely only need to pay for a few of them.

Set up your team

When it comes to setting up your Workspace, first think about who will be the best person to migrate first. If designers on your team have used our legacy product, Sketch Cloud, in the past — to upload and share Libraries, for example — it’s a good idea to use one of those accounts to start the process. When you log into that account, head over to the People & Settings… tab and click on the Switch to Subscription button in the banner to upgrade your Personal Workspace.

If your team hasn’t used Sketch Cloud in the past, just create a new free Sketch Account to get started. Your new account includes a 30-day free trial where you can try Sketch and your new Workspace, without having to pay anything upfront.

Once you’ve set up your Workspace, it’s time to send out some invites. Decide which members of your team will become Editors — remember, that’s anyone that needs to create or edit documents in the Mac app. You can invite them in the the People & Settings tab in your Team’s workspace — find out how here.

Your new account includes a 30-day free trial where you can try Sketch and your new Workspace, without having to pay anything upfront.

How team members set up their accounts

Once you’ve invited someone to your Workspace using their email address, they’ll receive an invite in their inbox. They can accept this invite with an existing Sketch Account, or create a new one. Again — make sure your designers all join the single Workspace for your entire organization, rather than setting up their own individual Workspaces.

Log into the Mac app

Designers that you’ve added as Editors will now be able to log into the Mac app with their Sketch Account. If the Mac app doesn’t ask them to sign in on launch, click Sketch > Preferences in the menu bar. In the Account tab, they can click Sign in to log in using their email address and password.

Log in through the browser

Team members that you invite as Viewers do not have access to the Mac app, but they can log into your Workspace through the web app. Here, they can browse all your team’s documents, leave feedback and inspect designs.

Uploading documents and adding Libraries

Now all your designers are set up as Editors, it’s time to upload your existing documents to your team’s Workspace.

If you currently have documents stored in other places, you can easily upload them to your Workspace from the Mac app. First, open the Workspace window by clicking Window > Workspace or hitting ⌘O. Here, you’ll see all your team’s Projects listed in the sidebar, along with all your documents.

To upload documents to your Workspace, simply drag and drop them into this window, or into a specific Project in the sidebar. Find out more about how you can organize your Workspace documents and discover more useful tricks in our documentation.

If members of your team used to store documents or Libraries in our legacy Sketch Cloud product, it’s easy to move them to your new Workspace, too. In their old Workspace, find the document they need to move, open the … menu, select Move, and choose your new shared Workspace. Find out more about this process in our documentation.

Always store your documents in a Workspace

There are big benefits to working on documents that are saved in your Workspace. Especially compared to working on local documents, or documents you keep in services such as Github, Dropbox or Abstract.

Your Workspace includes built-in version control, comments and threads for feedback from other team members, playable prototypes in any browser, and handoff tools for your developers. Plus, for Sketch documents in your Workspace, multiple designers can edit the same document at the same time in our native Mac app. Read more about real-time collaboration in our blog post.

Your Workspace includes real-time collaboration, built-in version control, feedback from other team members, playable prototypes in any browser, and handoff tools for your developers.

Adding and sharing Libraries

For growing design teams it’s important to agree on a single source of truth. Not only for your documents but especially for your Libraries: making sure everybody is working with the latest version of your Symbols, Color Variables and Text Styles is key to keeping a team in sync and productive.

For Libraries you distributed through another tool, like Abstract, all you need to do is to upload your existing Libraries to your Workspace. You can do that through the Workspace window in the Mac app, by dragging them to the Libraries section in the sidebar. The connection between your documents and the Library will remain, so you won’t need to do anything else to continue using it as you did before.

From then on, if an Editor in your team is working in the Mac app, they’ll be able to see and install any of your shared Libraries in Preferences > Libraries with a single click. This is great for new starters joining your team — all a designer needs to do is sign in with their Sketch Account and they’ll automatically get access to everything they need.

All a designer needs to do is sign in and they’ll get instant access to everything they need.

Sometimes, your team’s Libraries are so important that you want to control when updates go out and restrict who can edit these documents. And with Sketch, that’s simple too. To learn about our advanced Library features, read our deep dive on taking control of Library distribution in your team.

New documents

Now that you’re all set up, your designers should create new documents directly in your team’s Workspace — rather than saving them locally. If they save a document in your Workspace, it’s automatically available to all team members, and they can collaborate in real-time with other designers.

If they don’t want to share documents immediately with their co-workers, they can save them to their My Drafts project, which is completely private, and only visible to them. When they’re ready, they can share these documents with team members and receive feedback. However, they can still benefit from automatic versioning — and of course, the document will be available on any Mac they use.

Adding Viewers for feedback, handoff and more

Okay, so your Editors are set up and ready to get to work. But what about people who need to see and give feedback on projects, but aren’t designers? Let’s set them up as Viewers.

Viewers can access your team’s Workspace through any browser. They can view all your documents, play back prototypes, comment on designs, and even use our inspect feature for developer handoff.

To use our Inspect feature, select a particular Artboard in a document and switch to the Inspector tab. Here, Viewers can see layer attributes and quickly copy attribute values, such as color values. They can even see Symbols and their name in the design system, and view their Source — perfect for developers.

And if those developers need to grab the assets to use in their work, they can. They can either download all the exportable assets for a document, or just the individual assets they need. Handoff is available for free to any Viewer in your Workspace. Time to say goodbye to expensive third-party handoff tools.

Handoff is available for free to any Viewer in your Workspace. Time to say goodbye to expensive third-party handoff tools.

A Viewer account is an ideal choice for project managers, stakeholders and developers who need to see the latest updates — but don’t need to do any actual design work. Best of all, Viewers are completely free. So you can add as many to your team as you like, without it costing you a penny.

Inviting Guests to your Workspace

Your team is all set up and everyone has an account. But we know that sometimes you need to share your work with people outside your team — like clients who need to see individual documents and leave feedback. In situations like that, you don’t want to invite them to your entire Workspace, just the specific documents they need. The Guest role can help.

To invite someone to a specific document as a Guest, click the … on your document’s thumbnail and choose Document Settings…. in the Sharing tab. You can invite people by their email address and choose whether they can View or Edit. If you choose Edit, a Guest will need to have their own access to Sketch.

You can invite people by their email address and choose whether they can View or Edit.

It’s important to remember that when you invite a Guest to a document, they won’t be able to see any other documents in your Workspace. So if you want to share a different design with them, you’ll need to invite them to that specific document as well. Find out more about Guests in our documentation.

You’re all set

With a Workspace, you and your team have all the tools you need, at every step of the creative process. So you can stop paying extra for third party tools like Abstract for storing documents, Invision for exchanging feedback and Zeplin for developer handoff. Plus, by bringing all your people and projects together in your Workspace, you can streamline your entire design workflow.

We hope this guide has made the switch to a Sketch subscription easier. If you have any questions or need any more help, get in touch. You can talk to us via email, or drop us a message on Twitter — we’d be happy to help.