Sketch “Barcelona” brings new Liquid Glass effect, concentric corners & progressive blurs

Sketch has released its second update of 2025, code-named “Barcelona”, just three months after the previous “Athens” release. The headline feature is an all-new Liquid Glass effect, which can be applied with automatic defaults or fully tailored by adjusting every parameter to suit specific design needs.

In addition to the glass effect, the update enhances workflows by adding a linear gradient button beside the opacity slider in the inspector. This enables progressive alpha fades, offering a quicker approach to layer fade-outs than using alpha masks. Building on layer enhancements, users can now set a layer's corner style to auto. This automatically matches the corners of the nearest container that uses corner properties, providing visual consistency.

The effects section introduces expanded blur options for both backgrounds and layers, with Uniform, Linear Progressive, and Radial Progressive styles available. While design teams benefit from these core changes, Apple’s official Sketch Libraries have been updated to support the new glass effect across macOS 26 and iOS 26.

Smaller improvements include the ability to add search keywords to components and support for the P3 color space when exporting WebP images. The update also delivers various bug fixes and performance enhancements.