2025 has seen us make some of the biggest changes to Sketch in its history. We shipped three major releases — Athens, Barcelona and Copenhagen — all packed with features and improvements you’ve been requesting.
From an entirely new layout system and new container types, to an MCP server, a complete redesign, and more — there’s a lot to cover. Let’s dive in.
A new foundation with Stacks and Frames
Our first release of 2025, Athens, was the largest update we’ve ever shipped. At its heart was something many of you had been requesting for a long time — stacks.
Stack layout (stacks for short) is an entirely new layout tool, and our take on auto layout. It’s more flexible than our previous Smart Layout feature, and much more predictable.
With stacks, you can create anything from buttons that grow or shrink to fit their labels, to nested layouts that adapt to their container or content. You can control padding, alignment, distribution, and styling in a stack. You can also choose if its items fill available space, align differently, or ignore the layout altogether.
But stacks were only half the story. We also introduced frames and graphics — two new container types that replace Artboards and are much better suited for modern UI design. You can nest frames, style them with multiple properties (no more background layers!), and give them a stack layout. Graphics are ideal for icons and illustrations.
A more capable Command Bar
Our Athens update also brought components to the Command Bar. You can now press S to quickly find and insert any component type. You can also swap components with ⌥⌘R. No more digging through deeply nested menus.
On top of this, we brought some of the capabilities of the Command Bar to the Inspector. The components swapping popovers now have a similar look and feel, as well as the Command Bar’s handy keyboard navigation and shortcuts.
We truly believe the Command Bar is an essential part of Sketch now, and we hope these additions are a decent statement of intent. We have plenty more plans for it in 2026 and beyond.
Designing for glass
When Apple announced iOS 26, macOS 26 and Liquid Glass, we knew you’d need the right tools to design for it. A couple of weeks later, we had a beta out for our Barcelona release with a new glass effect.
We built our glass effect from scratch to be as accurate as possible, giving anyone redesigning their apps for iOS and macOS 26 a head start before the official release arrived.
Our Barcelona update also introduced progressive blurs — linear and radial blur options with adjustable stops. Just like gradients, you can move those stops freely on the Canvas and adjust them in the Inspector.
We also added a new fade effect. It gives you instant, gradient-based transparency without the extra steps of setting up an alpha mask. Just like progressive blurs, you can adjust a fade’s stops on the Canvas to get things looking just right.
Finally, we introduced concentric corners (or “Auto” corner style) to automatically align and calculate a layer’s corners based on proximity to its nearest container. In other words, visually harmonious nested corners are now effortless.
A complete redesign for macOS Tahoe
With macOS Tahoe, we knew we had to redesign Sketch. Copenhagen, our third and final major update of 2025, delivers exactly that. It’s our biggest update to Sketch’s UI since 2020.
Our goal with Copenhagen wasn’t just to give Sketch a fresh coat of paint — it also had to improve how you work. With that, it’s full of details that help your workflow.
The layer list has a new focus mode that shows only the layers you’ve selected and their relevant context. Combined with the Minimap, it makes navigating and working with those exceptionally busy documents much easier.
The Inspector meanwhile is not just a redesign, but a complete rewrite that we started much earlier in the year. It introduces floating panels for color and color variable selection, numeric fields you can drag to scrub without focusing, and alternate functions when you hold ⌥.
There are a lot of other details about Copenhagen’s design to cover — far too many for this end of year post. Check out our guided tour post if you want to know more about them.
Copenhagen also brings a feature many of you requested the moment we shipped Stacks: the option to wrap their contents. We wanted to take this a step further, so we built this for both horizontal and vertical stacks. The latter gives you some unexpectedly handy flexibility in column-based layouts.
We’ve also added one-click background removal for images. It works for people and objects — and because we use Apple’s on-device machine learning, your images never leave your Mac or get sent to any third party.
A better way to organize your work
If you’re storing and sharing your documents in a Sketch Workspace, you’ll know that historically, organization has been pretty straightforward. You could create Projects, and beneath them, Collections. With our Copenhagen release, we made things far more flexible.
Projects and Collections are now simply called folders — and unlike before, you can nest them infinitely, just like you would with folders on your Mac.
With folders, you’ve now got the flexibility to organize your Workspace in any way that makes sense to you — by client, project, stage of completion, a combination of all three, or any other grouping you like.
Sketch, meet AI
We shared our thoughts on Sketch and AI over a year ago now, but it might as well be a decade ago with the pace of innovation we’re seeing in this space.
A lot of what we said then still holds true now. We still believe strongly in privacy, that you should own your designs, and that AI models shouldn’t be trained on anyone’s work without their permission.
That said, we also believe in choice, so this year we brought an MCP server to Sketch. With it, you can give AI clients direct access to any Sketch documents you choose. It opens a whole new world of possibilities — from exploring designs, to generating new assets, and beyond.
Importantly, this approach helps us stay true to what we believe in. Our MCP server is local-only and cannot be accessed remotely. It’s also off by default, and you have full control over when and how AI clients connect to it.
…and so much more
Beyond the headline features, we’ve shipped over 100 improvements this year, from text override styling with Markdown syntax, to custom Canvas colors, and more. We’ve also fixed over 100 bugs, and made opening documents in the Mac app up to 5x faster.
Naturally, as we’ve introduced new features like stacks and frames in the Mac app, we’ve made sure that the developer handoff tools in the web app reflect them. We now represent the box model in the web inspector and include a better CSS preview. Better still, all of this is still free for developers you invite as viewers in your Workspace.
We’ve given our plugins API a few significant updates this year. It supports every new feature, is more reliable and easier to work with.
Finally, for teams with the strict privacy and security requirements, we’ve introduced a new Private Cloud offering. With it, you get all the benefits of our collaboration tools, but in an entirely isolated AWS environment. You can even choose a hosting region and use Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption.
Thank you so much for your support and feedback this year — as an independent company, our funding comes directly from customers who pay for our product, and we don’t take that for granted. A special thanks to everyone in the community forum for sharing ideas, reporting issues, and giving us invaluable input during every beta.
We’re already hard at work on our first new features of 2026 and we can’t wait to share them with you.
