Symbol Overrides, Component Performance, and Export Inconsistencies in

[joeroot]

I’m currently designing the UI for my Texas Roadhouse menu website using Sketch, and I’ve run into several workflow issues that are slowing down both design iteration and handoff to development. The project relies heavily on symbols and nested components to represent menu categories, individual items, pricing blocks, and nutritional tags. While this setup initially worked well, the file has grown significantly, and I’m now experiencing noticeable performance slowdowns. Simple actions like selecting layers, switching artboards, or editing text inside symbols sometimes lag or freeze momentarily, which makes day-to-day design work frustrating.

One major issue is with symbol overrides not updating consistently across artboards. I use a master menu card component with multiple overrides for item name, description, price, and dietary icons. In many cases, when I update an override on one artboard, other instances fail to reflect the change or revert unexpectedly. Sometimes Sketch even shows outdated override values until I reopen the document. This has become a serious problem because the Texas Roadhouse menu layout relies on consistency across dozens of screens, and manual re-syncing defeats the purpose of using symbols.

Another problem involves text styles and resizing behavior. The menu content varies in length depending on the item, and I rely on auto layout–style resizing to adapt components dynamically. However, text layers occasionally overflow their containers or collapse unexpectedly when switching between artboards or resizing frames. This is especially noticeable for descriptions and allergy disclaimers. I’ve double-checked resizing constraints and text settings, but the behavior still feels unpredictable, making it difficult to ensure visual consistency across breakpoints.

Exporting assets is also becoming unreliable. When exporting icons, section headers, or full menu screens, the exported files sometimes differ slightly from what I see on the canvas—especially in terms of spacing and alignment. In a few cases, vector icons appear slightly blurred or offset in the exported SVGs. This is problematic because these assets are used directly in production for the Texas Roadhouse menu website, and inconsistencies lead to extra back-and-forth with developers.

I’ve also noticed that shared styles and libraries occasionally desync. I maintain a shared library for typography, colors, and spacing tokens, but updates don’t always propagate correctly to the main file. Sometimes Sketch shows a library update available, but applying it doesn’t actually update the components. Other times, symbols break or lose overrides after syncing. This makes it difficult to keep design tokens consistent across the project.

Overall, I’m trying to understand whether these issues stem from file complexity, Sketch performance limits, or misconfigured components and libraries. If anyone has experience managing large, component-heavy Sketch files for content-rich websites like menu platforms, I’d really appreciate tips on improving stability, managing symbols effectively, and ensuring reliable exports. The Texas Roadhouse menu design is central to the project, and I want to make sure the design system scales without constant maintenance overhead. Sorry for long post!

[joeroot]

@joeroot

I’m currently designing the UI for my Texas Roadhouse menu website using Sketch, and I’ve run into several workflow issues that are slowing down both design iteration and handoff to development. The project relies heavily on symbols and nested components to represent menu categories, individual items, pricing blocks, and nutritional tags. While this setup initially worked well, the file has grown significantly, and I’m now experiencing noticeable performance slowdowns. Simple actions like selecting layers, switching artboards, or editing text inside symbols sometimes lag or freeze momentarily, which makes day-to-day design work frustrating.

One major issue is with symbol overrides not updating consistently across artboards. I use a master menu card component with multiple overrides for item name, description, price, and dietary icons. In many cases, when I update an override on one artboard, other instances fail to reflect the change or revert unexpectedly. Sometimes Sketch even shows outdated override values until I reopen the document. This has become a serious problem because the Texas Roadhouse menu layout relies on consistency across dozens of screens, and manual re-syncing defeats the purpose of using symbols.

Another problem involves text styles and resizing behavior. The menu content varies in length depending on the item, and I rely on auto layout–style resizing to adapt components dynamically. However, text layers occasionally overflow their containers or collapse unexpectedly when switching between artboards or resizing frames. This is especially noticeable for descriptions and allergy disclaimers. I’ve double-checked resizing constraints and text settings, but the behavior still feels unpredictable, making it difficult to ensure visual consistency across breakpoints.

Exporting assets is also becoming unreliable. When exporting icons, section headers, or full menu screens, the exported files sometimes differ slightly from what I see on the canvas—especially in terms of spacing and alignment. In a few cases, vector icons appear slightly blurred or offset in the exported SVGs. You can check check texas roadhouse website as well. This is problematic because these assets are used directly in production for the Texas Roadhouse menu website, and inconsistencies lead to extra back-and-forth with developers.

If anyone has experience managing large, component-heavy Sketch files for content-rich websites like menu platforms, I’d really appreciate tips on improving stability, managing symbols effectively, and ensuring reliable exports. I’ve also noticed that shared styles and libraries occasionally desync. I maintain a shared library for typography, colors, and spacing tokens, but updates don’t always propagate correctly to the main file. Sometimes Sketch shows a library update available, but applying it doesn’t actually update the components. Other times, symbols break or lose overrides after syncing. This makes it difficult to keep design tokens consistent across the project.

Overall, I’m trying to understand whether these issues stem from file complexity, Sketch performance limits, or misconfigured components and libraries. If anyone has experience managing large, component-heavy Sketch files for content-rich websites like menu platforms, I’d really appreciate tips on improving stability, managing symbols effectively, and ensuring reliable exports. The Texas Roadhouse menu design is central to the project, and I want to make sure the design system scales without constant maintenance overhead.

Is there anyone who can help me?

[JorgeF (Jorge Fernández)]

Hello @joe, sorry for the late answer! Most of our team is on holiday due to the new year and our response time is being affected by that. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Since your post covers several different topics, I will address each topic separately, in paragraphs.

Performance

We’ve detected a few performance issues in the latest version of Sketch (2025.3.2), and we’re already working to solve them. However, you haven’t specified the version of Sketch you’re using, so it would be helpful to have confirmation of this. Aside from that, it’s true that large files can tend to affect performance, even if no bug is involved. We always recommend splitting the files into smaller ones if this happens and using Libraries for different components as your project grows larger. In any case, although your other issues hint at substantial documents, it’s difficult to know if we’re talking about a bug, known or not, or a case of large documents, so we’ll need:

• To know the version of Sketch you’re using. You can see the version of Sketch you’re using in Sketch > About Sketch.
• A copy of the documents affected. You can write to us at productsupport@sketch.com with local copies or links to the documents so we can take a look and extract some logs from the performance issues.

Overrides not updating as expected

There is a known issue that we recently found related to overrides not resetting as expected. We’re now working on a fix, and we hope to include it in a future version of Sketch. It could also be related to how the structure and nesting of the Symbols have been designed. In your case, it’s challenging to determine if we’re discussing the same issue, so observing the issue in action will aid in troubleshooting.

Could you please send a screen recording of the issue in action so we can determine what’s going on here? Again, a copy of the affected document, or at least a sample document containing the Symbols and some Instances where we can reproduce the problem, could also be helpful. Similarly, productsupport@sketch.com is the email address where you can attach these.

Resizing of Text Layers

Once again, it’s challenging to identify the root cause without seeing the affected document in action. We could be discussing here the pinning or resizing options applied to different layers, particularly if these are nested Symbols that may be affected by other overrides.

We’ll need access to a sample document that allows us to troubleshoot, so the same recommendation applies here as well.

Exporting assets

We’ll need to reproduce these exports to see how these differ from what we see in Canvas. Also, I would expect that not all of these different exports are in SVG, is that correct? Are icons, section headers, or full menu screens equally exported in the same format? We’ll also need to know the goal of these exports. Perhaps you could use a different export format depending on the purpose of exporting these assets in the first place.

Anyway, if there are inconsistencies, I’d like to have them identified so we can file them internally and have our engineers take a look for possible misinterpretations Sketch might be making while generating export files.

Desynced Libraries

We’ve seen users reporting syncing library issues for a while. These issues are not frequent and we usually fail to reproduce them, so any additional info and sample documents and Libraries will help a lot.

In short, we can undoubtedly help suggest best practices or determine if there are bugs involved in the different areas you’re commenting on. Still, we’ll need a closer examination of the documents involved. That way, we can attempt to reproduce and test the cases, then address your concerns regarding improving stability and symbol management (if required), among other topics.

For attaching documents and videos, please use the email productsupport@sketch.com, so that your documents are not publicly exposed while we work on them.

Again, sorry for the late answer, I hope we can get to the bottom of these issues, we’ll be happy to help!

[raulrincon]

@joeroot hey! My colleague Jorge left you a reply, but the system might have tagged the wrong user.

Let us know if you can share those documents!