Hey folks 
Very happy to announce that our Athens update (2025.1) is now out of beta and in the wild — You can download it here, or open Sketch to update.
This is, with no exaggeration, the biggest update we’ve ever shipped. Aside from the headline features, there are over 100 improvements and fixes. If you printed the release notes out, they would be around 3m in length (that’s the height of a standard basketball hoop, or a young giraffe).
If you’ve been following and testing the beta, you’ll be familiar with a lot of this already, but for those who haven’t, let me walk you through the highlights…
Why call it Athens?
Alright, before we get into features — why the name? The short answer: once we passed version 100, the numbering got a little silly. We still need some form of number, so we’re using a year.version system now. In this case, 2025.1. But why call it Athens?
As a city, Athens is the birthplace of modern democracy, something we greatly value, and home to some of the foundational architecture of the modern world. And this release is all about foundational architecture.
Introducing: Stacks
Yep, it’s finally happened. An all-new layout tool in Sketch. If you know auto layout in Figma, or stacks in Framer, this is our take on it.
With Stacks, you can create anything from buttons that grow or shrink to fit their labels, to entire interfaces with nested layouts that adapt to container size or content.
You have full control over a stack’s size, padding, alignment, distribution, and styling. You can also choose if items in a stack have a different alignment, fill all available space, or ignore the layout altogether.
As ever, you’ll find more details over on the blog, and in the docs. We’re already hard at work on further stacks improvements!
New containers: Frames and Graphics
Stacks are only half the story in Athens. We’re also introducing Frames — a new container that replaces artboards, made for UI design, that works hand-in-hand with stacks.
You can nest Frames, style them with multiple properties (no more background layers!), set resizing constraints for their contents, or give them a stack layout.
For icons and illustrations, we’re introducing a different container type — Graphics. They have a fixed size, and their contents will always resize proportionally. They also offer a more focused Inspector, with no pinning or resizing controls.
Groups are sticking around, too. You can use them to organize layers and keep them together without additional properties.
Just like stacks, there’s a detailed write-up on these two new container types on the blog and more guidance in the docs.
Components in the Command Bar
We’ve all struggled with those deeply nested menus when inserting components, so we’ve replaced them with something far more efficient. The Command Bar now makes it easy to find and insert Symbols (Y), Text Styles (⌃T), Templates, Layer Styles and Color Variables from the Command Bar (⌘K). You can also swap any component you’ve selected with ⌥⌘R.
We’ve replaced the Inspector menus for swapping Components with a new popover inspired by the Command Bar. It shows more useful information, supports keyboard navigation for Libraries, and comes with a number of useful shortcuts.
We’ve improved Symbol thumbnails with customizable dark or light backgrounds, added rich previews for other component types, and new keyboard shortcuts to quickly drill down through your Libraries.
You’ve guessed it — there’s a post on the blog about all about these improvements, as well as more details in the docs.
…and so, so much more
All in all, we’ve packed more than 100 other improvements and fixes into this release. There’s too many to list here (check the changelog for all the details), but a few highlights:
- We now support basic styling for text overrides. You can use Markdown-like syntax for
*bold*,_italic_and[underline]in the Inspector, or ⌘B, ⌘I and ⌘U for text you’ve selected on the Canvas. - 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. You can exclude these properties from the Components view, and from the More menu under a Text Style’s name in the Inspector. You can set defaults for these properties in Sketch’s Settings.
- You can now exclude specific Symbols from showing in the Command Bar, Insert and symbol swapping menus. Ideal for placeholders, Symbols you only ever want to nest, or screen-size Symbols you don’t want to swap to.
- 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.
- New Text Styles now exclude color and alignment by default. Similarly, new Layer Styles will now always include corner styling by default. You can change these defaults as preferences in Settings > Layers. Copy and pasting a Layer Style will follow this corner styling preference, while holding ⌥ while pasting will do the opposite.
As ever, we’d love to know what you think of the release. If you have an issue to share, or a suggestion for something, please do share in the appropriate forum topics rather than replying here — the replies below can get hard to follow. We really hope you enjoy Athens!
