Latest News

We’re beyond excited to unveil Sketchpad’s latest update, loaded with design features to amplify your creativity. This release brings nine powerful new tools that give you unparalleled control over your canvas. 🚀

🔧 Enhanced Shape and Path Tools

Transform your designs effortlessly with our advanced path operations:

• Outline Stroke: Convert any stroke into an editable shape, ideal for custom typography and logo designs. ⚡
• Offset Path: Create parallel shapes and outlines with ease, perfect for borders, shadows, and intricate designs. 💫
• Boolean Operations: Combine, subtract, and intersect shapes to craft complex visuals seamlessly. ⭐

⚡ Streamlined Workflow Controls

Enhance your workflow with quick, accessible alignment tools:

• Quick-Access Context Menu: A right-click now opens essential tools, including:
  • Precise alignment options for flawless composition ↔️
  • Even distribution controls for balanced layouts ⇿
  • Transform tools for rapid adjustments 🔄
• Smart Layout Snapping: Intelligent guides snap your design elements to key layout points, ensuring pixel-perfect accuracy. 📐

🎨 Improved Creative Control

Bring your ideas to life with enhanced creative tools:

• Enhanced Paint Editor: Customize fills and strokes directly for refined control over every element. 🖌️
• Progress Tracking: Keep your projects safe with a new backup system, including detailed progress reports and import status. 💾

These powerful updates are live now for all Sketchpad users! Fire up your next project and discover what’s possible. 🎉

Hello again! We’re happy to be sending out our May newsletter with many updates coming your way.

Recently we’ve been posting more content on our Facebook page so check it out if you get a chance 🙂

Check out our Facebook

Artwork Submission

Want to submit the artwork you’ve made on Sketchpad?

We’d love to share your creations with our community to show all the ways Sketchpad can be used.

Submit your artwork*

* Please note that by submitting your work to us, you agree to it being shared on social media. We will contact you before posting your work and we will provide you with credit in the form of a hashtag, website link back, and/or social media username mention.

Feature Spotlight

Like last month, we will spotlight a unique feature available on Sketchpad to help expand and inspire your creativity.

This month we’re talking about the Fur Brush! It’s friendly and furry, so give it a shot on your next design.

Check out the brushes

Coming soon…

Get ready because Sketchpad 2020 is almost ready to be released.

We’ll be inviting users to participate in our open beta test of Sketchpad 2020 this summer so keep an eye out for an email invitation soon. Sketchpad 2020 includes many upgrades like better group support, Google Classroom integration, and an improved User Guide with example lesson plans and videos!

Dear Sketchpad Community,

We hope you are all doing well and finding Sketchpad to be a great resource for yourself, your students, or artistic talents.

Call for Submissions

This month we wanted to ask for beautiful sketchpad art that you or your students have done. We’d love to share them with our community to show all the ways Sketchpad can be used. Please note that by submitting your work to us, you agree to it being posted and shared on social media.

Submit your artwork

Feature Spotlight

In this newsletter, we will spotlight a unique feature available on Sketchpad to help expand and inspire your creativity.

This month we’re talking about the Web Brush! Have you had a chance to use it yet? Give it a shot, depending on the flow and angle the web-y-ness changes.

Check out the brushes

Dear Sketchpad Community,

As we face uncertainty the Sketchpad team wishes everyone safety and wellbeing. Rest assured we’re here to continue keeping Sketchpad running smoothly and available for everyone. We’re focused on improving integration with Google Classroom so teachers can easily create assignments and students can directly submit their work from Sketchpad.

Starting immediately we’re offering our downloadable version of Sketchpad for free to all teachers, students, and educators.

Sketchpad is completely FREE to use online with Google Classroom and it’s the best way for teachers and students to utilize Sketchpad in a learning environment. We’ve created some basic tutorial videos for getting started.

Watch Google Classroom Tutorials

Here’s a few things to keep in mind when using Sketchpad 2019:

1. Your previous saved drawings won’t be in the file pane.
2. If you’d like to transfer a file created with a previous version of Sketchpad, you can export the file as a .Sketchpad and then import the file into Sketchpad 2019.
3. Let us know your thoughts and if you experienced any problems by submitting a bug report.
4. You can still access Sketchpad 5.1 by visiting sketch.io/sketchpad

Try out Sketchpad 2019

Here’s some highlights from the new version:

• Group support for layers pane!
  • Creating a new group is easy, you can either:
    • Create a selection of layers, then press “CMD+G” on the keyboard.
    • Create a selection of layers, then inside the Layers pane click on the “Group” icon.
  • Editing groups is just as easy:
    • DblClick to select an item within a group while using Select Tool.
• Gradient editor improvements
  • Editing gradients couldn’t be easier:
    • Simply click twice using Select Tool on any Shape to edit Gradient fills.
    • Click anywhere along the gradient to add new color stops!
    • Click on color stops to edit with the Color Picker!
• SketchAPI codebase was migrated into ES6 and documented with JSDoc.
• Text tool improvements
  • Contextual menus: Easily move text, update bold/italic/underline while you’re creating your text block.
  • Ability to size the text based on the FitText algorithm or by specific setting the FontSize
• User Interface improvements
  • Tools are now neatly organized along the navigation bar for ease of access.
  • Layers pane & history controls are now in a Floating Toolbar which can easily be repositioned.
• Over 200 other minor optimizations & bug fixes!

We’re always looking forwards to, and towards user input—you’re opinion is important to us! Please, feel free to let us know how this version is working for you, as well as any suggestions you have.

Wishing you all the best in 2019! ?

Sketchpad is a great addition to any Google Classroom lesson. We’ve created a few tutorial videos to show you how you can easily add Sketchpad to any Google Classroom lesson. Watch the videos below and leave a comment with any questions!

Using Sketchpad in a Google Classroom Assignment

How to Submit Work to Google Classroom

Creating a Sketchpad Starting Template for Google Classroom

The Sketchpad Desktop App is here! Whether you’re working on a school poster or brainstorming your next comic book character, Sketchpad makes it easy to bring your ideas to life. Easily draw, edit photos, or design your next business card. Craft images for social media posts, digital ads, paper, or even apparel. Make a quick photo edit with the drag and drop feature, or lose yourself for hours in Sketchpad’s streamlined digital makerspace.

Download the Sketchpad Desktop App for just $4.95!

Your purchase supports the continued development of Sketchpad and helps keep the app free of ads. Sketchpad is made from a labor of love and we thank you for your support!

Sketchpad is now integrated with Google Drive! Never lose a file again by connecting Sketchpad with your Google account. Visit https://sketch.io/sketchpad/ and click the settings gear to get started!

Feedback is always appreciated so let us know if you experience any issues by submitting a bug report!

Have no fear, Sketchpad 5.1 is here! Check out the latest features:

• Updated Sketchpad User Guide
• Reorganized UI with collapsable sidebar
• Improved Brushes and touch handling
• More Clipart and Fonts
• Import and sketch on PNG, JPEG, GIF, and PDFs

Get in touch with us and send us your thoughts or let us know about an issue!

Extra extra! There’s a new Sketchpad in town! Here’s a rundown of the latest features:

• Choose a theme, or create your own! ? My current favorite is Deep Purple!
• 12 languages professionally translated, complete with LTR/RTL support:
  • English
  • 中文 (Chinese)
  • Español (Spanish)
  • 日本語 (Japanese)
  • Português (Portuguese)
  • Deutsch (German)
  • العربية (Arabic)
  • Français (French)
  • Русский Язык (Russian)
  • 한국어 (Korean)
  • Polski (Polish)
  • Svenska (Swedish)
• Realtime preview of tools while editing settings!
• High-Res export is now more reliable with all tools.
• SVG export has been added.
• Heart shape added.
• A few spunky new clipart have been added, not much, but super cute, more soon!
• The interface has been smoothed out, to be more a structured, uniform, and visual user experience.
• Vector Fill has greatly improved support for Clipart.
• Bitmap Fill (previously Floodfill) is back! The latest version creates a vectorized cache of the floodfill region making future renders much speedier.
• Much speedier scrolling of Layers/History panes thanks to Clusterize.js

Hope you enjoy! Btw, If you work with a school or non-profit education center contact me about getting a free license to use SketchPad with your students.

I’m excited to announce Sketchpad 4.0! The focuses on this release has making the app more colorful, faster, and easier to use.

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

• Stroke/Fill is available on all brushes.
• VectorFill replaces Floodfill for crisper edges and much faster rendering! This can lead to some fun by importing an SVG into Sketchpad, re-coloring it, and download it back as an SVG (right click to download!).
• Linear gradient editor
• Radial gradient editor
• Text updates with special thanks to OpenType.js & some inspiration from FitText! Editing text now feels very smooth. Additionally these new features are available:
  1. Font Size is automatically set based on textarea dimensions
  2. Bold, Italic, Underline & Stroke styles
  3. Align Left, Center, Right & Justify
  4. Line Height & Letter Spacing
• Crop has been merged with the Resize tool making life simpler. What’s better the crop tool now automatically zooms your viewport to fit so you can see your entire document while cropping.
• Your library view has been updated with a more robust & spacious interface, along with more obvious buttons for renaming, duplicating, and removing documents.
• High-res export now works on all tool and style combinations!
• New auto-save UI allows you to disable the ‘auto-saving’ feature. This is helpful especially on large documents with thousands of layers that may take awhile to autosave. Although, to that end, auto-saving is much faster in the new version.
• And finally you’ll find an export button right on the toolbar for all those who requested it!
• Special thanks to jsondiffpatch which is now used in Sketchpad’s history.

There are a couple things that could not be 100% converted to the new version Sketchpad. You may want to consider whether these matter to you before upgrading your files (you will be prompted). My apologies for any inconvenience these may cause you:

• FloodFill was depreciated. It just did not make sense to keep in. It cost too much to maintain, it was notorious for crashing users browsers. Sketchpad is a vector app, so a bitmap FloodFill never made sense. The new VectorFill replaces the FloodFill, and the results are much nicer!
• LinearGradient format needed to be upgraded in order support the new Gradient Editor, in doing so LinearGradients may shift slightly.

If for any reason you’d like to use the older version of Sketchpad you can find it at its new permanent URL: https://sketch.io/sketchpad-3.7.6/

Or better yet, check out the latest!

https://sketch.io/sketchpad/

Sketchpad v3.7 is here! Here’s a list of new features:

• High-Res export for print! 300DPI
• Autosaving to library!
• Document resizing.
• Path smoothing on Pencil tool—no more shaky lines!
• Path tool – curved path editor.
• Polyline tool – straight line editor.
• Arrow brush with curved path (or straight path)
• More background styles! Colors, gradients and patterns, oh my.
• Outline style on Shapes, Text, and various supported Brushes.
• Angle control on Linear Gradient style.
• Color Noise on Linear & Radial Gradients
• Designed for Mobile/Desktop hybrid experience.
• Improved speed of undoing multiple actions.
• Text-box resizing without scaling by holding ShiftKey.

Play around with the latest version to see for yourself ?

Sketchpad has been used in applications from scientific machine learning, to kids drawing, but we haven’t had much chance to focus on any commercial aspects. This is why we’re excited to be changing that. We’re gearing up to provide the technology that makes your users product customization experience quick and easy by tapping into our experience + codebase in building Sketchpad.

One of the many features we’re creating to push the envelope is instant previews of customized products—there is no more need to upload the artwork, process the preview on the server, and then download once again, this can all be done in milliseconds in the browser.

We’re looking for partners who own print companies, with websites that are in the need of automation and HTML5 goodness. Connect with us—https://sketch.io/contact

Sketchpad 3 is available in the Chrome Webstore (for free), combining WebGL effects with vector editing, and lots of HTML5 goodness!

Some of the major improvements include:

• Webcam FX core integration—take photos with your camera, add filters, and place into your drawing!
• Save your entire drawing, from vector commands, to attached assets into a single .SKETCH package container which can be reloaded into the app via Drag & Drop. Special thanks to Zip.JS
• Gradient text support (with live preview).
• Improved SVG parsing/rendering.
• Improved UX.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sketchpad/kkghjbajgkcialbbimbifdcjilhcgoim