What Sketch feature do you use to manage states?

What workflow do you find helps manage states like active, hover, disabled, etc?

  • Do you create layer styles for these and apply them to layers in a symbol as you place them on screens?
  • Do you name colors as the states and use the name of a color swatch?
  • Make iterations of a symbol with the different states and use those?

What is your go-to way to manage these? Is there a workflow I may be missing? Generally, these will be exported to Zeplin so any method that works well while exporting to Zeplin would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I always create symbol instances whenever component has states. When exporting for developers I put all the variants on the artboard so it is easier for them. They could just check the design system part of the file but I find most developers preferred this approach. I avoid complicating things, so I usually just make all variants visible. If they were layer styles they would not be so easy to see and use for other designers in the team and for developers.

As I go along I’m finding more and more that creating an instance for each state is the best approach. Thanks for the feedback!