Sketch's 2025 Year in Review: A Foundation of Innovation

The year 2025 marked a period of unprecedented transformation for Sketch, witnessing some of the most significant changes in its history. We proudly rolled out three major releases – Athens, Barcelona, and Copenhagen – each packed with highly anticipated features and improvements driven by user feedback. From an entirely new layout system and versatile container types to an advanced MCP server and a comprehensive redesign, there's a wealth of innovation to explore. Let's delve into the highlights.

A New Foundation with Stacks and Frames

Our inaugural release of 2025, Athens, stands as our most substantial update ever. At its core was a long-requested feature: stacks. Stack layout, or simply "stacks," introduces an entirely new, more flexible, and predictable approach to layout design, evolving beyond our previous Smart Layout feature.

With stacks, designers can effortlessly create dynamic elements, from buttons that intelligently resize to fit their labels, to complex nested layouts that adapt fluidly to their containers or content. Stacks offer granular control over padding, alignment, distribution, and styling. Users can also dictate whether items fill available space, align distinctively, or even bypass the layout system entirely.

However, stacks represented only half of the Athens innovation. We also unveiled frames and graphics – two new container types designed to replace Artboards, offering superior suitability for modern UI design workflows. Frames can be nested, styled with multiple properties (eliminating the need for separate background layers), and integrated with a stack layout. Graphics are perfectly suited for icons and illustrations.

A More Capable Command Bar

The Athens update also enhanced the Command Bar by integrating components to the Command Bar. Users can now quickly find and insert any component type by pressing S. Component swapping is streamlined with ⌥⌘R, eliminating the need to navigate through deeply nested menus.

Furthermore, we extended some of the Command Bar's capabilities to the Inspector. Component swapping popovers now share a consistent look and feel with the Command Bar, complete with its intuitive keyboard navigation and shortcuts. We believe the Command Bar has become an indispensable part of Sketch, and these additions underscore our commitment to its future development, with more plans slated for 2026 and beyond.

Designing for Glass

Following Apple's announcement of iOS 26, macOS 26, and Liquid Glass, we recognized the immediate need for designers to have the appropriate tools. Within weeks, we released a beta for our Barcelona release, featuring a new, meticulously engineered glass effect.

Our glass effect was built from the ground up to ensure maximum accuracy, providing designers a crucial head start for redesigning applications for iOS and macOS 26 before the official releases.

The Barcelona update also introduced progressive blurs – offering linear and radial blur options with adjustable stops. Similar to gradients, these stops can be freely manipulated on the Canvas and fine-tuned within the Inspector.

We also added a new fade effect, delivering instant, gradient-based transparency without the additional steps required for setting up an alpha mask. Like progressive blurs, a fade's stops can be adjusted directly on the Canvas for precise visual outcomes.

Finally, we introduced concentric corners (or “Auto” corner style). This feature automatically aligns and calculates a layer’s corners based on proximity to its nearest container, simplifying the creation of visually harmonious nested corners.

A Complete Redesign for macOS Tahoe

The arrival of macOS Tahoe prompted a comprehensive redesign of Sketch. Copenhagen, our third and final major update of 2025, delivers precisely this – marking our most significant UI overhaul since 2020.

Our objective with Copenhagen extended beyond a mere aesthetic refresh; it aimed to fundamentally enhance user workflows. The update is replete with thoughtful details designed to streamline your creative process.

The Layer List now includes a new focus mode, displaying only selected layers and their relevant context. This, combined with the Minimap, significantly simplifies navigation and work within exceptionally complex documents.

The Inspector, meanwhile, isn't just redesigned but represents a complete rewrite initiated earlier in the year. It introduces floating panels for color and color variable selection, numeric fields that allow dragging to scrub values without requiring focus, and alternate functions accessible by holding ⌥.

Copenhagen's design includes numerous other details, too extensive for this year-end summary. For a comprehensive overview, we encourage you to explore our dedicated [guided tour post](our guided tour post).

Copenhagen also addresses a highly requested feature since the introduction of Stacks: the option to wrap their contents. We took this further, implementing it for both horizontal and vertical stacks, with the latter offering unexpectedly useful flexibility for column-based layouts.

Additionally, we integrated one-click background removal for images, effective for both people and objects. Leveraging Apple's on-device machine learning, this feature ensures that your images remain on your Mac, preserving privacy without transmission to any third party.

A Better Way to Organize Your Work

For users storing and sharing documents within a Sketch Workspace, organizational structures have historically been straightforward, centered around Projects and Collections. With our Copenhagen release, we introduced significantly greater flexibility.

Projects and Collections are now unified and simply referred to as folders. Crucially, unlike before, these folders can be nested infinitely, mirroring the organizational capabilities of folders on your Mac.

This new folder system empowers users to organize their Workspace in any logical manner – by client, project, stage of completion, a combination thereof, or any other custom grouping that suits their workflow.

Sketch, Meet AI

We shared [our initial perspectives on Sketch and AI](our thoughts on Sketch and AI) over a year ago. Given the rapid pace of innovation in this domain, that timeframe feels almost like a decade.

Much of what we articulated then remains true today. We steadfastly believe in privacy, in users owning their designs, and in the principle that AI models should not be trained on anyone's work without explicit permission.

Nevertheless, we also champion choice. This year, we introduced an MCP server to Sketch. This server enables users to grant AI clients direct access to any chosen Sketch documents, unlocking a new realm of possibilities – from design exploration to asset generation and beyond.

Importantly, this approach aligns with our core beliefs. Our MCP server is strictly local-only and cannot be accessed remotely. It is also disabled by default, providing users with complete control over when and how AI clients connect to it.

…And So Much More

Beyond these headline features, this year saw us deliver over 100 additional improvements. These range from text override styling using Markdown syntax to custom Canvas colors, among many others. We also resolved over 100 bugs and optimized the Mac app to open documents up to five times faster.

Naturally, as new features like Stacks and Frames were introduced in the Mac app, we ensured that the developer handoff tools in the web app fully reflected them. The web inspector now accurately represents the box model and includes an enhanced CSS preview. Notably, all these developer features remain free for viewers invited to your Workspace.

Our plugins API received several significant updates this year, now supporting every new feature while offering enhanced reliability and ease of use.

Finally, for teams with stringent privacy and security requirements, we rolled out a new Private Cloud offering. This provides all the benefits of our collaborative tools within an entirely isolated AWS environment. Users can even select their hosting region and utilize Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption.

We extend our sincere gratitude for your invaluable support and feedback throughout the year. As an independent company, our funding comes directly from our customers, a trust we do not take for granted. A special thank you goes to everyone in the [community forum](community forum) for sharing ideas, reporting issues, and providing essential input during every beta phase.

We are already diligently working on our initial new features for 2026 and eagerly anticipate sharing them with you.