Hey folks 
We’re very excited to bring you a brand new beta, with a brand new version number — 2025.1 — and, for the first time, a name.
We’re calling this release Athens. As a city, it’s home to some of the foundational architecture of the modern world — and this Sketch release is all about foundational architecture. But before I get into the details, some important housekeeping…
Before you update
Opening documents in this beta will make them incompatible with the current stable release of Sketch (101.8). This will affect others you share documents/a Workspace with, too. Please make backups/only open copies of your documents in the beta.
Second, changes in this release may affect some plugins temporarily. We’re updating our plugins API to support these changes, but plugin developers may also need to make updates to stay compatible.
Finally, this release requires macOS Sonoma (14.0.0) or newer. We need to bump the system requirements from time to time to use new Apple APIs and technologies.
With that out of the way, here’s what’s new!
Introducing: Stacks
Yep, it’s finally here. An all-new layout tool in Sketch. If you know stacks in Framer, or auto layout in Figma, this is our take on it.
Since our early sneak peek we’ve added a host of on-canvas controls for things like padding and spacing, drag-and-drop support for adding layers into your stack, support for Symbols and their instances, and much more.
To create a stack, select a group, frame, Symbol, or even just a selection of layers and press ⇧S. We’ll set up your stack with our best guess at the layout you need (including things like replacing a background layer with a fill on the stack itself).
Stacks give you full control over size, padding, alignment, distribution, and styling. You can choose if items in a stack have a different alignment, fill all the available space, or ignore layout altogether. And that’s just the start.
New containers: Frames & Graphics
@paulozoom hinted at this in the stacks sneak peek, but we wanted to introduce a new, more flexible container alongside stacks. So, we’ve done that… and built one more for good measure.
Frames are the replacement — and upgrade — for artboards. You can nest them, style them with multiple properties (no more background layers!), apply resizing constraints to their contents, or apply a stack layout. In other words, they’re the container for designing UI views and components.
Graphics are a new container type for designing icons and other graphical elements. Like frames, they’re fixed-size, but their contents will always scale proportionally.
And yes, groups are still a thing. They hug their contents, and have no additional properties. So, they’re great for organizing and keeping specific layers together.
And so much more (seriously…)
Our previous beta featured big updates to the Command Bar and component swapping. I won’t go into detail about those here because @baxterma did a great job of demo-ing them in his sneak peek. It’s well worth a watch.
Beyond this, there are many, many, many(!) smaller improvements you might appreciate. Too many to list here, so I encourage you to check out the release notes. A few highlights for me, though:
- In the Components view, there’s a new option to change the thumbnail background for your Symbols — ideal for those lighter icons that almost disappear on a gray background. You can pick between dark, light, or app appearance.
- When you duplicate a layer many times consecutively, we now offset each new layer based on the distance between the previous layer and the one before that. A tricky one to describe, but try duplicating a layer, offsetting it a bit, and then duplicating again. You’ll see what we mean!
- Alignment and text color are now optional properties in Text Styles. If you’ve found yourself with lots of text styles covering each alignment option in your Libraries, this one is for you.
How to get the beta
You can download our beta from sketch.com/beta — you’ll need an active subscription or license to use it. If you already have a beta build, you can open it and follow the prompts to update.
How to share feedback
If you run into any issues, the best way to share them with us is to click the 
Send Beta Feedback button in the toolbar. This should open an email template in your client of choice to fill out and send to us.
We’ll also be around in the replies to help you get to know this update — especially if you’re unfamiliar with stacks and frames from other apps. So, whether it’s general feedback or a question about how best to use these new tools, we’re here to help.
Enjoy!
