Principle 3

The largest update yet

Send Events Between Component and Parent

Principle 3 adds the ability to route events from a component to its parent, or from the parent into a component. You can even have one component trigger animations in another component. When creating an event, simply hover over a component or the "send to parent" button to send the event there. Learn more

Color Drivers

Drivers can now drive fill color, stroke color, and shadow color. Cool.

Lockable layers

Whew. There it is. This works how you expect, with two nice touches. First, the mouse cursor will have a lock icon beside it when hovering over a locked layer to remind you that clicking there may not select the layer you expect. Second, selecting a locked layer via the layer list allows editing it like normal; we found this makes it really nice to make a quick change without having to unlock and re-lock. We added the ability to right click on the canvas and select layers via a menu to make it easier to select locked layers without having to find it in the layer list. Learn more

Improvements to Sketch Import

We put a lot of work into Sketch import for this release. Principle can now import symbols with overrides. Principle's import dialog now has the option to only import Sketch's selected artboards. We added import support for flipped and blurred layers. Reimport is also much improved: the ordering of your Sketch and Principle layers are maintained during reimport; additionally, scroll settings and scroll group's sizes are merged instead of overwritten.

Animation Preview

Editing an animation immediately plays it in the preview. Really handy.

Image Export

If you've ever needed to send images of your designs to the rest of your team, you're in luck. Just select some layers and click File > "Export Images of Selected Layers" and Principle will render high quality PNGs of each layer. Learn more

Touchable Layers

Starting in Principle 3.0, layers without events or interactions will allow touches to pass through to layers behind them. This is nice for creating visual overlay layers, and groups that contain layers spread across the canvas. For situations when you want to prevent touches from passing through a layer, you can manually mark the layer as touchable. Learn more

Copying a Layer Copies its' Events

Duplicating or copying and pasting a layer will also copy its events. This is great for when you have something like tab bar layers that you want to paste on each artboard and maintain the events on each tab.

Much More

Those are only the biggest changes. There are many more small changes, fixes and improvements that will make working in Principle feel even better. For example: the color picker's hex field is now initially selected so you can easily copy and paste hex values. You can see the full list of changes on the change log.

How to get it

If you already have Principle, you can go to the Principle menu then click "Check for Updates". If that is grayed out, just restart Principle and you'll be running the newest version. Or can download it manually. Since Principle licenses include one year of free updates, you may need to purchase a new license to use 3.0 if you purchased Principle more than a year ago.

Say Hello

Principle evolves based on the feedback and enthusiasm of the Principle community, made up of people like you. If you have any problems that the documentation and tutorials don't cover, contact us!