Hey folks 
You may have already spotted it, but our second 2025 update — Barcelona — is here!
While we’re hard at work redesigning Sketch for macOS Tahoe (more on this later), we’re releasing this update with our glass effect now to help you redesign your own apps. This has been in beta for a while now, and we’re happy to see Apple adopt it in their own iOS 26 and macOS 26 UI Libraries.
With glass being the headline feature, and following our new European cities naming convention in alphabetical order, Barcelona was the obvious choice for this release. After all, it’s home to the Sagrada Família and some of the most beautiful glass in the world.
But of course, we couldn’t leave glass as the only feature in this release. So, let’s dive into it all…
Introducing: Glass
You’ll find this all-new glass effect under a new Effects section of the Inspector, where you can apply automatic settings or tweak every parameter to your liking. It’s a lot of fun to experiment with, and we think this level of controlwill make it useful beyond macOS and iOS updates.
Read our glass documentation →
Concentric corners
You can now set a layer’s corner style to Auto. This automatically aligns them visually with the corners of the nearest container that has corner properties. We calculate this based on the layer’s distance to that container — or the container’s padding if it’s a stack.
Read our corner styling documentation →
Progressive blurs
In the Effects section of the Inspector, you’ll find new layer and background blur options. Choose from Uniform (replacing the previous Gaussian and Background options), Linear Progressive, or Radial Progressive. Progressive blurs support multiple adjustable stops, like gradients, which you can move freely on the canvas.
Read our blurs documentation →
Progressive alpha
We’ve added a new button next to the opacity slider in the Inspector to switch to progressive alpha. It gives you a faster and easier way to fade out a layer, without needing to set up an alpha mask. You can also adjust and add stops to the opacity gradient on the canvas.
Read our opacity documentation →
New Apple UI Libraries
Apple has updated their Sketch Libraries with glass for both macOS 26 and iOS 26. You’ll find them in Settings > Libraries.
30 more improvements and fixes
Along with the headline features, you’ll find a number of smaller improvements. There are also plenty of bug fixes and performance improvements. Here are a couple of my favorites:
- In the Components view, you can now add additional keywords and search terms for individual components, making it easier to find them in the Command Bar without needing to know them by name.
- Container names now adapt to light or dark canvas colors — a small bug significant improvement for anyone who’s struggled with readability there.
As ever, we’d love to get your feedback on this one — whether that’s right here on the forum, via social media, or any of our other support channels. We’re all ears.
What happened to the Tahoe redesign?
A few of you might be wondering about this, since we originally announced it would be a part of the Barcelona release. We decided to split things up for two reasons:
- It felt important to get glass into people’s hands earlier so they could take advantage of it in their own redesign efforts.
- Our Tahoe redesign is progressing and we have some ideas we’re really happy with, but we also need to make sure it still looks good on earlier versions of macOS. Having two entirely different UIs is not an option
. We hope to have more to share on this very soon!
As ever, we’d love to know what you think of the release — you can share any issues you’ve found, or suggest ideas for future updates in the usual places. Enjoy!
Maybe, just maybe because you are a smaller team than Figma, don’t waste time on a redesign of the app now. Add more features into the app first that users need and ask.