Set entire canvas as "graphic" or use "graphic" as default?

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1

Hello there!

I’ve been using Sketch for some 15 years, but I’m fairly certain I’m not the traditional user. I mainly use it to quickly make graphics for syllabuses and small projects, and almost never go through anything even resembling a decent workflow. I mostly use one big canvas and move stuff around as needed, and then export whichever bits I need. That has worked fine for 15 years, but recently, Sketch has been driving me crazy enough to turn to these forums for help.

From what I’ve been able to tell, the sizing options have changed for layout design for apps. I don’t need any of this stuff, all this means is that resizing groups is just broken now.

I found this post which apparently has the answers:

No problem, just put everything inside a graphic. Except that means I lost the infinite canvas which made Sketch great for my use case. Why would I want to limit myself to a specific rectangle?

No problem, just use “graphics” instead of groups. Great, except I have over 1000 documents which use groups and not graphics, documents with often over a hundred groups in them, and when Sketch suggests some of them can be changed into graphics, it give me, e.g. 3 of the 100. Also, graphics grey out anything that’s not in a graphic, which groups don’t, which again means I kind of lost my infinite canvas.

Is there any way to restore the old groups functionality (the “graphics” one) as the default instead of using the “frames” one as the default?

From the blog post I read ( Frames and Graphics: A not-so-short guide · Sketch Blog ), groups aren’t even that useful for frames (“In frames, you’ll likely use groups a lot less”), so why is the default behaviour the frames one anyway?

And in general: is nobody actually using the infinite canvas anymore? Is everything frames and graphics now?

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2

Hey)

I do not know if I understood your problem, but the graphic canvas can also be made infinite, press cmd and pull the edge of the frame and the size will change without changing the content.

3

hello, how did you use to export your graphics? It’s still possible to group some layers and add an export preset. I think the tip to change your groups to Frames (or Graphics for that matter) does not apply to the way you work.

4

Usually using a slice, sometimes by making a group exportable or by using a workspace, only rarely using a graphic. The exporting isn’t the issue, though, it’s the fact that I can’t manipulate groups without it defaulting to the “Frames” behaviour.

Let me make a simple graphic to illustrate what I mean:

Slice 2
Slice 2968×340 6.53 KB

I’d like for groups to default to how ungrouped shapes are resized (or to how graphics are resized) and not how frames are resized. The new way Sketch resizes groups pins the top left corner of each shape. I don’t want the top left corner pinned when resizing, I just want the selection to be bigger.

5

That’s not an infinite canvas, then? I get that you can do that, but I don’t want to work within the confines of a predefined rectangle, even if I can resize that rectangle. I mostly don’t want to create a bounded area just to restore functionality I had when I bought this app for €32 back in 2011…

6

wow, I did’t know this behaviour had changed. I don’t know what the rational was, and I would prefer groups to resize like before on the canva.

Would the scale tool work for you? In menu Layer>Transform>Scale or the K shortcut

7

Scale works, but also resizes borders, text, and the like, so it’s not 1-to-1. It also requires an additional button press and interface for what should be a simple operation.