The No Bull guide to become a Figma pro in 2023, and UX/UI/Product Professional

1. Introduction and trailer: Hey, thanks for clicking on this and wanted to check out my course on Figma. So this is the noble course on Figma. And what we're gonna do is teach you how to get up to speed on being a Figma Pro as quickly as possible. My name is Chuck, and in line with the Nobel philosophy, what you're going to get out of this is nothing extra, nothing fluffy. We're gonna give you exactly what you need in order to be fully confident and competent in using the Figma tool in order to realize all of the ideas and the things that you're discussing with your friends, with your teammates and express that into the Figma tool. So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to trust me and trust this course and see how we're gonna get there. Using my course is fourfold. First is that I've been a Figma user since 2018. And not only that, I'm currently a friend of Figma for the Manchester area. So I've been heavily pulled into Figma and I really love it and what I've been able to achieve with it. And that's something I'd love to share with all of you to. Second is the type of work that I've done as well. So I've been an excellent software engineer, the next tech lead. So not only do I understand how to be a product designer and understand how to get the best out of Figma and make your workflow is simple and straightforward as possible. But I know what your engineers are going to need because I have that skill set. I know how everything fits together. So that's the second reason. Third is a type of places that I've worked as well. So it's not just corporates that I've worked at or startups that have worked at work to both. So in terms of corporates and enterprises that have worked at in reverse chronological order is Jaguar Land Rover. Before that, I worked at the Cooperative Bank here in the UK. And before that I was at a consultancy called KYC solutions, which is now part of Disney streaming. So you know that it's not just HTML, CSS, some of the basic stuff. It's gonna be really complex, difficult things that I've been able to achieve and been able to deliver within engineering skill set. So I know exactly how those people think, how those people in those positions want to receive designs. On the Figma side. Next is medium. So I've been writing articles and medium for a few years now with over 300,000 views, I might add on the UX Collective, the biggest UX publication medium. And I've been really keen on teaching others in the community how to do from some of the simplest things like making sure you master frame nesting in Figma to more complex things like actually being able to prototype breakpoints and being able to put those types of prototypes together. And they're not always useful. Don't get me wrong. But sometimes they're really worth it when you really want to check something out and make sure that something's prototype as good as possible in order to get the best result possible for your users and for your product. And if that's not enough for you, I've got my trustee pet dog window here to keep the company from time-to-time. So keep an eye out and you might join us for some of the lessons. That further ado. If you're not convinced by now, then there's no angle to convince you. So for those of you that do want to stick through, thank you so much for choosing to take a chance on me and I won't let you down. Let's get started. 2. Window, panels, and the main stage: In this lesson, we're going to cover the basic Panels, windows, and things that you'll want to be aware of when first opening up a file in Figma and getting yourself oriented. So what we'll cover is the layers panel, the pages panel, the design, prototype, and inspect panels, as well as where your default tools and things will be located. So in here, when you open up a Figma window and you open up any file, or even when you don't open the file, you'll see a little plus icon in the top. And you'll see this page, which is handy when you want to pick between a design file and a fig gem file. Will open up a new design file here and get you oriented to the different windows and where everything is located. So as you can see when you first open, there's not too much happening. You've got the main stage in the center. So this is where you'll do most of your design work. You've got the Layers panel here opened by default on the left. So all the important stuff you'll want to be aware of and manage will be there. So as I create some basic things, you'll see the different layers will pop up here in the layers panel. What you'll see is that the pages panel isn't open by default. So I usually have this opened myself and as my file starts to get larger and when I want to be organized, working with others, this is what I'll open up. And you can create pages here, pretty straightforward. The other panels that you'll want to be aware of are over here on the right side as well. So if I create a simple rectangle, you'll see that the design panel opens up a few different options about its location, the size, a few different customizations you can do. This design panel changes depending on what type of layer that you've got open. So you can see here with the text layer, I've got the different things I can open up and edit from a tech point of view. The other panels that you'll see is that when I create a simple frame, so this is what I want to create a prototype and create some flows to create a clickable prototype. This is where I'll need to be. So you can create some flow starting points depending on which frame that you've got. Set up the interactions from different frames or from different layers. So you can create an interaction from these things, but you can create an interaction from these things. Then what else you'll see is the inspect panel on the right-hand side. So this produces some auto-generated properties and colors. So I don't use these personally myself too much. But your devs, devs that you work with may use these themselves. And you can see some, some basic auto-generated code that may come in handy. So the two of the things I do want to bring to your attention, or three actually is. First is the background. So you can change the color of the background if that's too late for you, you want to work on a darker background, let's say you're more comfortable with that. So that's usually a nice to have it here. Interested in changing that up, but I like to just leave it as the default. Second is the the local styles. That's what I wanted to share with you. So I've created a rectangle here and let's change this color to something random like lime green. Once you've created that color, we can add it to our local library. By doing this. Lime green, let's call it. What that does is adds it to your local styles. So there's a bunch of different things that you can add. Text, colors, effects, and grid styles that you may want to use to help you create your designs and your prototypes. Over up here in the top is the last thing. I, all the second last thing actually, before I go over that, the second, the last thing I do want to share, second last thing I want to share with you is this thing up here. So it'd be able to see where your file is located and rename it. So my, my first file. You'll get a few different options from here to be able to move to a different project favorite your file, duplicate it if you want to publish your library. So when you start working with design systems, that's something you may want to use. The very last thing to share and cover with you is all of your main tools will be up here. These are deceptively simple. There's not that many tools compare it to. If you're a bit old school and you've used Photoshop back in the day. There's a huge panel, different tools that you can use. In the next lesson, we'll go over these tools, how to use them, and how to get the best out of them. 3. Tools and their keyboard shortcuts: So next, we're going to cover the different tools and oriented around what the tools are, what you can use them for, the shortcuts that you'll be able to use as well, and then flip between the different things. So back in the file will start from left to right here in the top bar. So the default tool that you have is the pointer tool. So if you have a few different things, the pointer tool is good to just drag things around. And the shortcut for that is v. So the way I remember is the letter V is quite pointing. So you can use that too. Point around. Below that is the scale tool. So we awhile to discover this, but the scale tool is actually really quite cool. So k is a shortcut, or you can click using the toolbar in the top left. And this is quite new, actually, this is quite recent. This wasn't here before, and you can scale by factors that you want to scale by the default. The default is from the bottom left, I believe. So we do times two. You can see it's grown from the bottom left corner. You can also grow from the center. So if I do times two again, you can see it now overlaps that square to the left of this one. So that's the scale tool and you can also click on things and just click and drag as you please. You can also scale. It scales in proportion actually, I think is what I'm trying to say. So you shouldn't have to worry too much about getting the right size. If you swap back to the pointer tool, you can then change the shape. As you might expect. Next, we've got the frames, sections and slice. Frames are your bread and butter, so we'll cover those in the next module. This is how you stitch together different prototypes and you can work on frame nesting. And when you use the frame tool, you also get some presets. So it is pretty cool that you can use things like the Apple Watch preset or you can use other things and say actually I've got MacBook Air and I want to create a prototype based off that screen size. So that's very handy. What you can use as well. Here is the section tool. The shortcut is Shift S. And the section is quite good for putting your things together. So you'll be able to organize your stuff altogether and drag things left and right. That's quite cool. Let's get rid of that. Next, we have the shape tools. So the default is the rectangle. So as you saw up there, if I use are, I can draw a rectangle and customize it over onto the right. I've also got the line tool and the arrow tool. So I can use L for drawing a line, or I can use Shift L to draw an arrow. I can use 0 for, it's the Ellipse tool, but I remember it as 0 for oval. So I'll drag it. It doesn't maintain any aspect ratio. And behold down Shift, it's going to be exactly square. It. That's quite good for, for creating the oval shapes and doing things like avatars or some icons. You've also got these other tool, the polygon and the star. So star is pretty much by default, you just create a star icon as you like. And you've also got the polygon. So by default that's a triangle. But in the next module, out should cover how to edit this and some in-depth stuff about editing shapes. He also got Place image or video. And I don't normally use that. Actually drag straight from the desktop or from my file browser. And I find that much easier. Next we have the pen and pencil tool. I don't use the pen tool so much because it's it's dot to dot, which is okay. But what I've used more often is the pencil tool. So I might use that to annotate things and say this is my polygon and this is a star. So find the pencil tool is quite good and that works an iPad as well and tablets. So that's quite good if you just want to sketch down something or do some annotation and design critique. You've got the text layer. So you can create texts layers and add in your text into your designs and prototypes. You've got the resources, so that covers your components, plug-ins and your widgets. So that's quite helpful. Then you've got the hand tool. So what you may have noticed is that I've been dragging around whenever I wanted to browse, does a direct hand tool, but you can also middle click and use that to move around your file. And finally, we have the comments. So I can press C for comment and say this is a text layer. There you have it. That's all the tools that you have to work with. 4. Pages and page name best practices: So finally, the last thing I think is worth covering in itself is pages. And that's because it's not always, it's not clear at first how many pages you should have, how you should structure that, that sort of thing, and also the limitations as well. So in terms of recommendations and how I suggest, you organize your pages and put them together, is you use these five different constants. So first you have your cover. So that's the first page that when you go back to the file browser, you'll see whatever you've got in this particular file. So it can be good too. Put this up top and say my first file. And if I then frame this, this can be the cover sheet. So when somebody looks at this file in the file browser, this is what they'll see. So you can put the key information, use it for statuses, that sort of thing. And that's very helpful when working with other designers. And even just to remind yourself what you're working on and what, what's contained within this file. The next one is these two. So they're called Final and prototype. So final can also be called hand-off. Sometimes. I like to put that as the second page. This is when you've finished going through your design process and you've finished figuring out what you want to build, how you want to build it, that sort of thing. This is the page that I would direct my engineers and the designers to when I want them to see what exactly needs to be built and what exactly is coming up next. And what I like to do is break that down as well a little bit. So this is what you would consider the finished page if you like. You can also create alternative versions as well. So that can be helpful sometimes if you want to indicate to people, we've actually gone through a couple of key revisions. And we want to build a version one, but here's a version two we might want to put on top. The next suggestion is a prototype. This is when you have a clickable end-to-end prototype and what I might want to communicate to other designers and the developers, et cetera. Maybe different to the clickable prototype or the user tests that I'm putting together. So that's why I recommend having that as a separate page. Working is the next one. So this is where you'd spend the bulk of your time or where I spend the bulk of my time experimenting with a few different flows, a few different ideas, a few different ways to model something or to communicate something over to the user and to see if we can get to a conclusion until a decision about what it should be. This is good if I need to do some small fixes and tweaks as well, an update. Things like we might want to change the type scale of its very early days or later on, we might choose to change the border radius and we want to make sure that that looks quite right or update the copy e.g. before moving over into the handoff page. The last one I'd recommend is components. So there's another module that we'll discuss components end-to-end and in-depth. But having a separate page with your components is very handy so that if another designers coming into your file, they're not going to click on the working file and go, where's all the components? Or go into the prototype and say, where's all the different bits and pieces? Maybe over copy over the, the wrong sorts of things. So have a few different blogs and things talking about this, about why this is a really useful thing to do. But long story short, if you have one page where you've created all the new working components are all the local components. It's good to separate the two and put them together onto the same page. So you can see clearly, here are the components that I've created that should be absorbed back into a bigger design system. Here in the local components that I've only used locally for this file in order to deliver the work and arrive at the decision. So that wraps up the first module. I hope that was useful, gave you an orientation in terms of where the different panels are and how to find your way around Figma inside the design file. Where to find the core tools that you'll need to use and how to use them, as well as the pages and my recommended setup for pages. In the next module, we're going to cover the shapes and the tools and use them a bit in depth. So you can see in a little bit more detail how to get the best out of those things, instead of just dragging and dropping the different presets. 5. Checkpoint 1: take a breath: Cool. So hopefully you feel oriented around the Figma program and you don't feel too lost when you jump in and you're trying to figure out what is this window, what does that window now you have an idea of where all the main things sit onto a figma design file. Next, we're gonna go into colors, lines, and shapes, and topography, not in that order, but we'll go through those things. You look confused as well. You're like what yelled about. Yeah, we'll go through those things. Yeah, you're doing great. Keep it up. 6. Shapes, border radius, and shape editing: In this module, there'll be quite easy. We're going to cover shapes, border-radius, and shape editing. These are the fundamentals and you've, you've used things like Sketch or Photoshop before, or have you experimented with editing those different shapes or even macro media fireworks when that was a thing. You'll find this quite natural. Otherwise, don't worry, we will go into the different details and the nitty-gritty that you'll need to know in order to be good UX UI or product designer. So back in the editor will start with the rectangle tool. The shortcut again is our, if we just create it, It's nice, dead simple. You can create something than to add a border radius. You can add it in over here. So what this does is it adds it to all the different corners. So this is quite good for creating a card type thing, e.g. you can also do that two frames, by the way, as a quick aside, so you can add border-radius so that will come in handy later. And the thing to know about border-radius is you can make it independent. So e.g. I. Might want to make the bottom two corners sharp, but the top one actually be rounded. If I'm creating e.g. I. Right-click and flip vertically, I can make this white e.g. and make it shorter. And then it looks a little bit more like a card. That's quite helpful when working with border radius. If we add in a polygon, I can show you where. I think here border-radius still works on all the corners. But what you can do is when you go into shape editing, this is where you can add more vertices, I think is the word. And all of them have independent border, radius value. So here I can change this to 999 and that's like super curved over here. But I can leave these two as they are and add in more things as I need. So I might need a different shape. So this is quite useful if you want to do some fine tuning on some shape and do some more illustrative work naturally like edit shape. And then using the border radius in conjunction with that, you can make some really complex shapes or some really fascinating shapes as you need and as you see fit. The oval tool is probably the next interesting thing to share with you. So again, remember that 0 is for oval. And if I hold down Shift, I can change the air, keep the aspect ratio as I update the size. So that's really quite handy when I'm working with that thing. The other thing to mention is there's also the rotation. So if you do it the wrong way, you can change the rotation of the object or the hover near one of the corners, you can drag it to the right angle that you prefer. Holding down the Shift key. You can change it to one of the snap degrees. So you can see here it changes about every 15 degrees. If you're keeping an eye on the value in the top-right, that's quite handy when you want to work on shapes, putting them together using border-radius, adding in those vertices and creating custom shapes. Using that to get out exactly what you want and putting them all together. The last thing before I move on two lines is the Star Tool. And I'm not sure to be honest with you why this is its own custom tool. But over here it has this special property here about accounts of spokes are spikes that you might have in the star. So sometimes it's just fun to play around with it. It looks like 60 is the maximum that you can do. But that's quite helpful if you need a more of a star shape. 7. Tricks with Border Radius: One last little thing I like to show you, which is pretty cool, is if you remember, we use 0 and press Shift and we can make a circle. Now with the border-radius, Let's create a rectangle the same size. And if you set the border radius to a high value, let's say 200. And now it looks like a circle as well. Let me just change that color so you can see that a little bit more clearly. But do be careful when using this. Because if I use just the regular point pointer tool and then resize it. And you'll be able to see that one remains as a circle. And one just looks like a rectangle with very curved edges. So do be careful when using that technique, which is not wrong, but it's a nice little technique you can use. If you need to quickly do a circle. And you want to use the rectangle tool instead, or that's what comes to mind first. 8. Lines and arrows: Now that you've got a grasp of the tools for creating shapes, editing shapes at, in the border-radius, lines and arrows, which will be quite easy for you. I'll show you. So first we'll create some lines and things for us to work with. So you use the, you can click here for a line and draw it as normal. Or you can use l as the hotkey for doing that. And if you hold down shift, you can instead of having it free form, you can have it move down to a particular angle. You can change the thickness of it. You've got all these different settings over here, so that's pretty handy. I can just type blue e.g. and do that. Hold down the Shift key and then pressing L brings up the arrow tool. So it's good to keep an eye on the top-left to see what tool you're using. And then that creates an arrow. And I can use that to annotate my designs and things that I'm working on. So e.g. I. Could do this and then just press Shift L every time in order to connect up all the different shapes that I've got. If you want to make the arrow a different shape, e.g. what I do sometimes ease, drag an extra vertex and change that to say 50, maybe 200. 200 gives us a little bit more to play with this. And gives it a nice curve. So you can double-click to go into the editing and then double-click outside to go out. And from here, now I've got a nice little arrow I can drag over here. I can go to the corner and rotate and say here is my, let's use T for text. Just to illustrate and use K to enlarge. So here is my starting point. And I can annotate a little float. So that gives you an idea of the line tool, the arrow tool, how to edit it and move it around. And practically what you might use it for. 9. Colour Styles: So for this part, we're gonna be talking about styles. And first we'll talk about color styles, how to set them up and get started as quickly as possible so you can start creating stuff faster. So back in my first file, you may have noticed, or if you remember from one of the previous lessons, we set up one basic color style called lime green. And just to recap, when we do something like a rectangle. So the shortcut is R, and you can just drag across onto the main stage. To do that, we can update the fill with one of the local styles that we've created. So one thing you'll notice is I've got a set of different colors here. And these used to be provided by default whenever you created a new team, but that's no longer the case. So what I'll do is I'll provide a link in the description of this. If you want to use them or if you want to use something more modern, what I'm gonna do is use material design, using some of those resources. And I suggest those in order to set up your palette and just start working from. So e.g. we have this file that I've found on the community. So we've got about 5,000 downloads and it's very easy. You can simply make a copy. And all you'll need to do is click on here. Click on Publish library. I'm using the free plan and most probably, most likely are two styles, only. The default colors. And publish those styles. And there you go. So from there, there'll be able to go back to your file. You can click on Figma and click on Libraries just to make sure that we've shared them. And you can see I've got these libraries available which remain. But this one I've just published the material design two colors. And so on the free plan, you can share the basic styles. So what that means is now I can click on Close and I can then change the fill color. And I've got all of these colors available across a color spectrum. So the order is okay. You've got these like absolutely no, it's pretty good actually. So we've got based on material to design now material three years out, but this will help you get started and at least be able to work with something. So I can set the stroke of this e.g. let's set that to ten pixels. Maybe that's too much, maybe five. And we can go into here and we can update those colors and set them to your heart's content, maybe a slightly better color than that. So what this means is that you can set up these styles. And then instead of trying to remember the hex codes like this, like remembering things like d9. It means that as you go through your design, you can try and remember which ones they are. One tip I'll give you as well is you can search by name. So you can see on the color scale for material, they go from 50 over here all the way to the darkest shade, which is 900. And then they have some shades of 100, 200, 300, et cetera. So you can filter by these and just type pink 700 and it will come straight up. So that's a very easy way for you to quickly piece together design and make sure that your colors are consistent so that when you piece it altogether and use take a step back, the design looks hole. 10. Typography Styles: Great. Now that we've got you set up on colors, let's get you set up on typography. Because once you've got those two things together and then using the basic shape tools in Figma, you'll be able to create a lot of stuff already without learning some of the other more advanced techniques. Jump in. When it comes to typography. Don't forget that our shortcut key is T for text. When we put in, we can say my first title, e.g. what we're going to want to do is I'll show you how to set it up. If you want to create your own typography stack. And then I'll show you the shortcut. So you can skip forward. If you're a shortcut type of person like me, or if you want to understand how it works, That's also like me. I'll give you a quick intro. Let's set my first title. Let's call it a 24 point. And if you want to create a style and click on the plus, then don't forget, we can set one and say Heading style. Now, when you want to create some more texts, you can say some other text, and it will default to the most recent texts heading style. What you can do if you want to set some body text is you can decouple that. So if you ever get stuck, don't forget, you can always detach style. There's no problem with that. Set the size of it. Let's set this back to irregular. And now I can make another style cool. Now, when I've got a few different things that I'm designing or putting together. Now I've got my local styles defined for heading and for body. And I might be able to create a few more. So if you have a clear idea of the ones that you want to put in place, or you have a graphic design background, e.g. or maybe you have a front-end engineering background and you've already seen this sort of thing. That's cool. You can always set that up and customize and play with your heart to your heart's content. If you want to fast forward and you're not so much of a visual designer. Like I still am to some degree. What you can do instead is you can download something e.g. like we did with the colors. Here's a file I found on the community. So I've already copied this into my drafts. And just like before, we can publish this library, publishes styles only, let's say base type photography styles. Very straightforward. We can come back into here. Click on Libraries from the figma menu in the top left in my file. And then I can enable that file library in my current working file. If we close this and then make a copy of this. So I can Command C, right-click paste here. Now, I can change these and I can see these material design typography styles. So let's say Heading two, which is massive, and we've got body one. So when you're putting together your own designs and things that you want to put together. You can also do is you can use this as a basis and then tweak these styles. I do suggest try and sticking to some existing system. If you're not too experienced, haven't done this sort of thing before. I find it very helpful because it sets the typography scale in a nice way where it's very easy to see what's the title, What's the body, and what's a label? So e.g. if I'm doing a button, I can go to the button style and set the style up in a way that you can visually recognize it and distinguish it from the other styles. So there you go. There's a quick setup into textiles, how to do it yourself. And a suggestion of something that can get you started right away. 11. Checkpoint 2: still breathing?: Gray stuff. So I hope you're enjoying the course so far. In this module, we're going to cover frames, groups in sections. Now, this deserves its own module because there's some subtle differences between a group and A-frame. And what you'll notice is that your muscle memory might be used to by grouping things together. It's important to note that there is a difference and frames are actually more powerful. And I'll show you the reasons why they're more powerful and why you'll use them more often. But why groups are also pretty important to remember too, because they have their own benefits to being used as well. You've also got sections in here as well, which is a relatively recent addition to Figma. So this is really good for organizing your work. So I feel that really rounds up to three different tools that you'll use together. If you're more of a reader, then I've got this article, which I'll link down below that wrote around two-and-a-half years ago. Now, that explains the differences between using a group and using a frame and when you might want to use either. So that's pretty helpful. And without further ado, let's crack on. 12. Groups: So let's get started with groups because for many people, especially if you haven't been a designer before or use some of the designer tools in the past. Groups will be a lot more familiar to you. So we'll jump into the Figma and I'll show you how that all fits together. So to demonstrate how groups work, what I'm gonna do is create a few different things. So I have a regular text layer, will have a circle. Let's just call that circle and make it blue so it's easier to see. Then what I'm gonna do is also import an image. And let's whoops. So as you can see there, that was pretty cool actually, you can actually place it inside objects. If you important image we're gonna do is actually just shove that over here and let it be hold down Command. You can actually crop without having to double-click and edit images. So that's pretty handy. And here's some latte art I've been working on learning how to pour. So to show you how that all fits together, if you grab this, you can right-click and you can group a selection or press Command G to bring that together. And when that happens, you can resize that to see what happens to the layers inside. So as I do that, you can see everything inside scales as wide as the group itself is, shrinks down to match. And it's a little bit harder to see with the texts layers. But if I click on that, you can see that it also resizes itself within click on the group and do this. You can see that that's gone to the same size. So one thing to be aware of is that you won't yet see some of the tools that you'll get with a frame. And if you want this to maintain its size, that's not possible with groups anymore, especially if you've gone away to read the article I wrote about groups versus frames. So you can't actually edit the constraints. You can't edit, whether you want it to scale or not. All you'll be able to do is with a group when you group stuff and you get the default behavior of how groups work and fit together. This is a little more familiar. This is probably a lot more on what many people will be used to, except for the text. So this is a lot more like the scale tool. You press a key to scale. Remember this is in the top left, and I scale it. Maybe that's a bit more familiar. And this starts to show you some of the small differences in Figma and what you might get a glimpse of when we are moving onto frames. As you can see you when I moved back to the pointer tool. And if I resize this, it everything squishes down. That's just the size of the layer itself, but text layers behave a little bit differently. So when using a group, these, this is one thing to be mindful of. So when you group things together, they are going to scale. So if you need to resize things, it's not going to work the way you might intend. So I'll leave it there for now when it comes to explaining groups, how to do it and how they fit together. When I cover frames, you'll see exactly where the difference is really starts to shine and really make a big difference to how you piece together your file and how you piece together your prototypes and designs. 13. Frames 1 of 2: So where groups were quite simple and quite easy to get a grasp of. Hopefully that was okay for you. Let's dive into frames. There's a lot to cover. So let's get started. So what I'm gonna do is copy over these three things. I will make a copy. So you can see there I held down the Option or the Alt key and drag out a copy of the original thing. So that's why I can do to put things back to some sort of rough rough scale that I can work with. I'll do is I'll just scale this one down as well, or change the text. Actually, I do this and change this back to what was it, 16. It's more like 24, something like that. So if I copy all of these, now these are not grouped. I can frame this selection which is different, the shortcut being Command Option G. And now I have a frame. And at first it doesn't seem like anything is different, but if you start resizing it, then you'll see that things don't change their location and they don't seem to change their size. If you go from the left, it seems to stick to the left. And the same with the top. And only by digging into these things here you'll be able to see the differences. We'll just do is take that out. And if I select the image layer, e.g. you'll see in the design panel that there's this thing called constraints left and top of the default things. And this is how things behave on the web. So if you're not used to designing things for the web, what you'll notice is the behaviors you want to see. For digital products, things you'll see on the web and mobile apps. They'll behave a lot more based off constraints compared to more of a traditional group that you might find in things like Google Slides or PowerPoint presentation files. These are quite powerful because you can do things like if I select this circle, e.g. let's put it in the center, and let's give this frame a background color. So we'll use the fill. And let's select a light green type of color, and this is roughly in the center. Now, when I resize, the width now follows the middle. And so hopefully what you can see by that is that your brain is starting to think and see. There's different things that we can achieve with frames. Something different here. And what you'll notice is that by using these constraints, we can actually make it quite powerful. So if we do left and right, we can mimic the behavior or we can use scale to more exactly replicate. A group does. So if I set the width to scale, we can do that. But with the frame, It's great because it's even more powerful that as I do this, it remains the same. Or what I can do is instead just center that when I resize this frame, then stays in the center, quote unquote, of that frame. One of the first things you'll probably want to know and learn how to do is actually how do you make the scrolling behavior for prototypes. We'll cover prototypes in depth later. But what's really important to work with is the scrolling behavior. So if I take all of these and change them to left and top again, what I can do is change the height of this and there's this thing called Clip content. And what you'll notice is that things can be inside a frame or inside a frame. You can cut off what's there. And so that can help when changing what things should be visible, what things should be editable? One of the interesting things that you can do in Figma is the overflow scrolling. So when I do vertical scrolling, which is probably the most common thing you'll wanna do. Now when I put this into a prototype. So let's do this just to demonstrate the behavior. Now you can see as I scroll, It's almost like a webpage. Now, using these basic building blocks of a frame, how that fits together using the constraints, you can choose how things actually displayed together. And you can use this overflow behavior to dictate how things should flow together and how your page should work. So that's really quite going to be very useful. And one of the bread and butter pieces of your toolkit. And using Figma. 14. Frames 2 of 2: So the last thing I'd like to do to close off this lesson is give you another example of just how powerful frames can be. Let's do e.g. an overlay. So when we get into this frame, every remember, you have to scroll down to get to the blue circle. Let's turn that into a button. And what we're gonna do is just create a very simple overlay, if you like. So what I'll do is group that together, make that red, change the lines. So one good thing I'll mention to you here is that definitely keep an eye on your layer structure. That's really going to be helpful for you moving forward if you get lost or you're not sure. What's a frame once a group, so you can keep an eye on the different icons here. So this is a group e.g. with the dashed line. And the frame is more of this like hash type of thing. Here had gone to x, then overlay, overlay thing. And let's do a simple line here and here. Let's make them a little bit duller. And then, don't worry, we'll go over this sort of stuff a little bit later. In one of the later modules, actually get rid of that just for demonstration purposes. So if we do this, we can very quickly create an overlay yourselves, some padding. Let's do that. And then give it a little bit of color to something. Maybe not that color. Yeah, go on, Let's do that and give it a border radius. So here we've got our basic overlay, and this is a frame. And this is only possible to do because it's set up as a frame. So when we go into the Prototype tab, you can actually create a new interaction. And when you click it, it opens an overlay. And we can select the overlay frame. And when we do that, we can add a background. So we've got the dull background in the background. And now, when you open up this prototype, we can scroll as we demonstrated before. And if you click on the blue button, you can then see your overlay. This is just one of the many different powerful things that you can do with frames. And what I really wanted to share with you in order to help you understand what's the difference between a group was the frame and why do we actually have these two different things? 15. Should I use Groups or Frames: Cool. So now that I've given you an introduction to what groups are, what frames are, the kinds of things that you can achieve with both, hopefully it starts to become clear which things you should be using more often and when. Still get asked the question, which one is better or when should I use either? Unlike if you want a quick rule of thumb, always default to a frame. And there's a couple of reasons why. So even though groups do have their place and they still behave much more like images would do when you scale things up and down, especially when you're working with presentation files, that might be a behavior you're more used to a, that's still something you can replicate with a frame by setting the objects inside to a scale behavior. And B, texts layers just don't behave in the same way. You may as well use the scale tool instead and you can change the size of things. So those are the main reasons why you would actually use a frame over a group. And they do have a couple of use cases. But if you check through the article that I shared before is actually not so the ability to use constraints in groups anymore. So that's something that used to be the case and now that's gone. So in my opinion, they're a bit more of a legacy thing. And I think one of the other major, I'd say pitfalls because it is not a major benefit when a different designer or a different person is working in your Figma file, if I want to lengthen a frame. So e.g. I. Might have an iOS screen or mobile app screen that I'm working on. And I want to add an extra section. If i e elongate that for any groups that are inside, that's going to elongate the thing. So I'll give you a quick demo of that now just to show you hello. So here's an example of a mobile screen. Actually, let's give that a oops. Let's give that a quick fill. Just so it looks a bit more like a page. What I've seen is that here you've got a navbar, this group of stuff. And why we call it just the filter. I want, I've seen before is that this isn't the default actually. So it may not be a problem for you. But as designers work on a large file and as they work together through large problem, sometimes the constraints gets set to scale by default. For a group of stuff, usually this will be icons or groups of a couple of different things together. What you'll see is that if I need to elongate the screen, this sort of thing happens. And that's really frustrating. When you use a footer. It should definitely always be bottom. So don't worry, we'll go into those kinds of constraints later. But you'll see this sort of behavior and that's not what we want. What we want is for it to just create some more space for us to work with when working on a design. That pretty much summarizes my take on when you'd use a group, when you use a frame, long story, short, use frames, they're better. 16. Sections for organised files: Cool. So last one, not long to go is the section tool up here with the frame. You've also got this thing called section. This is a relatively new feature or Figma, that's been quite heavily recommended. So as I've been going through these different lessons and sharing with you how things fit together. It can be very easy to get lost. And what you might be tempted to do is to group certain things into a frame. But when you do that, you can lose the integrity of interactions or the way that you set certain things up. And sections have slightly different behaviors and different properties which long story short, all you need to know is this a safer way to group a collection of different layers and frames and things that you're working on so that it's easier for someone to look at your file. So e.g. if I click on the Selection Tool or Shift S for the shortcut, I can do this. I can give this section a name. So this is first set of stuff. And if I create a new section, this can be my frames. Frames, frame selection tools. And what I can do is move. Whoops. Hasn't gone over those things quite right. What I can do is cut those things using the cut command and just paste them inside. I can do that and then drag around all my stuff nice and easy. And it's quite good because here I'm working on shapes and lines. And you can change the color of your section. So let's say I wanna do more of a light red color because this is something I need to get rid of and I can change the label. This is really quite useful when you want to organize your work and make it clear to somebody how old these things fit together. One of the superpowers that you'll find from sections is that you can nest them within each other, but they're very much a top-level thing. So explain what I mean by that. So we take this one, this selection of frames and sections. What I can do is select that and I can move the shapes and lines into this section. And now all of this is movable together. So that's quite handy. But one of the things that is different about sections is that you can't drag them into frames. So let's say I create a frame about this size. And I want to drag this section or drag a copy. I can drag it here into this area. But as you can see, it's added it into this frame. So one of the problems with setting up frames before and using that to organize your work visually be the same, but because a frame can be inside any other frame, it starts to get very messy quite quickly, where you could accidentally group things or add things into a frame and the wrong way. So sections do two things. They allow you to organize your work and make it clear. But do that in a way that doesn't make it easy for yourself or other designers browsing or editing your file to organize things in a way that loses the integrity of the structure of what you're working on and putting those things together. 17. Checkpoint 3: Auto layout, my hero: Hey there, you shirt, new lighting, that same quality content. So in this lesson we're going to talk about auto layout. I'm going to show you how all of those different tools and techniques that you can use as part of auto-layout can really make your life so much easier. And it can really make your day-to-day in Figma and building out designs. That much more of a pleasure. I'll give you a quick show over now of what we're going to be able to build the time we finish teaching you those skills. Here in Figma, we have a trivial example of a website for selling microwaves. And as I scroll down, seems pretty typical. Just a couple of feature images with some copy, a call-out for the call to action. And this thing about the bright collection whenever we want, we want to call it. And if I zoom out just a little bit, as I grow and shrink this, you can see how everything responds to the size. And that's something we'll explore it together. This seems daunting, don't worry. We'll go through it step-by-step and you'll be amazed at how quickly you can put together something just like this yourself. In a matter of several minutes, less than an hour for sure. Let's get started. 18. Horizontal/Vertical resizing, and spacing basics: So first we're going to cover Horizontal and Vertical Auto Layout and give you a little bit of a feel for how these things work together. So what I like to start with is these navbar and the future components. And I'll show you how those fit together. First, let's take the top navbar. Take a copy of that, and let me destruct it first. So if I ungroup and you can see that's kinda hard to see. Even change this to, oops, to a black color temporarily. We can see over here we've got a logo and then we've got a frame of these different things. So, but ungroup it, you'll probably start with something like this. Get a group of items and you'll get something else you might want to put on the side. It will highlight these and then I turned it into a frame. So that's Command Option G. Two ways you can then add all to lay out to here is first is the ultimate layout. You can just simply click here or the shortcut. I like to use this shift a, and that automatically applies auto layout. You can see here it'll set some horizontal padding, whatever is closest and split them up evenly. You can adjust that yourself to whatever you'd like. And this sets the default or the horizontal. If I e.g. take three copies of this and make them roughly vertical and do the same thing. You don't need to group at first, you can simply press Shift a and it'll take you straight into adding all to layout in Figma will work out that everything should be stacked vertically and figure out the rough spacing that should be there. So from here, let's turn this original one and start nesting it. So this is really quite important. So we covered nesting frames and that's really important to make these things happen. So here I've got this frame on the left. So these are my menu items. Oops. That's cool. That menu items. And it's this one. This is Jacquard white because I'm using a instance of a component. And then group these together and press Shift a again. You'll see that I've added auto layout. And it's automatically done. This. One thing you'll want to do to achieve the actual navbar effect is actually to ignore the spacing between. And let's give it a fill just to make it easier to see. Let's do something like this so we can differentiate it. And the first thing that you'll come across really quickly is the spacing. So we'll, we'll, we'll do this. And this 12.12. So that sets the left and right and wrong thing you'll notice is that as I do this, it doesn't respond. What we'd want it to do is change the spacing mode. So if I undo that and go over here into the three dots, there's this thing called packed, and the space between the default is packed and you can set how much spacing there should be between each of the items in that particular frame. But if I do space between, now, between these two items in this frame, as they grow and shrink, it will always stick to the right. So if I just add to make it look a little bit more natural and normal, reveal the structure of what's in here. For creating enough bar. We've got the menu items themselves nested inside with its own horizontal layout. We've got the logo on the right. Then. For this main nav bar, it's got its own auto layout, but we've changed the spacing and given it a fill. And what we've done is adjust the spacing mode in order to get this responsivity. So that's one really simple example that you can do. And working through it step-by-step to start exploring how the horizontal works. The vertical works, and also some of the things like the spacing, which we'll go into a little bit more detail in one of the next lessons. The only last thing to add is that for the vertical layouts, this is very much the same thing, but things just flow in a different direction. So you can see here, if I hover over the spacing, vertical spacing between the items when a flip between horizontal, vertical. Looking at the photo, you can see that each of these items, how these vaccines spacing between themselves. 19. Alignment and item order with Auto layout: In this lesson, we're going to cover alignment of items and we're going to cover item order. Because one thing you'll find is that sometimes you want to rearrange the order of things or it might come into the wrong order and you might need to adjust stuff. Very common, but very easy. I'll show you. So here are the two examples that I'll be working with is the footer and one of the main pieces of feature image plus copy. So taking this as an example that we follow one from what we learned from the first lesson, as it did here. In order to achieve this is doing a vertical alignment of all these different items. And then what I've done is just changed the alignment and you've got this really nice grid. This makes it so simple to change how you want things to be arranged. So I could arrange them to the left, to the right. If I choose to have a fixed height, I can change for it to be in the top-left, the bottom-left, over to the right, dead center. So there's so many different options that you've got to play with. And it's good to keep in mind that if you want something that's a little bit more complicated, you will have to do some frame nesting in order to get the achieved to achieve the desired effect. To illustrate some of that frame nesting effects, I'll use this example over here. So let's cover the rearrangement of stuff really quick before we dive into it, where you can do is you saw on the other piece, I had this and they were in alternate order. Simply drag your item over. And it just works as long as there's auto layout in the parent frame. This example frames 63, it should just click to it. Be mindful that where you drag that item to your layer to it might take things outside of the auto layout frame and adding it back in. Sometimes as easy or sometimes it's a bit finicky and you can start to go and nest things in a little bit deeper. So e.g. here, I've moved the image into a different frame. So when looking at frame nesting and adjusting how things are, to illustrate first, let's make this a little bit larger. So you can see that this is in the center. If I change the alignment here to the middle, that changes that style and how that comes together. But if I do this, you can see that internally, this is done a different way. If I change this to fixed width, which we'll cover in a bit, don't worry. And just change the width of that. I can change the width of some of the internal items like this, e.g. you can see this frame with all the copy. I can change how that gets displayed, whether it's to the left or to the right. So this is why you'll start to see that trying to teach all of these step-by-step can be quite tricky because they very quickly come together hand in hand in order to achieve responsive components and do responsive design. Within Figma. 20. Hug, Fill, and Fixed resizing modes: So next we're going to look at the horizontal and vertical resizing modes. So do all of these examples using the horizontal, but the same rules apply for vertical. I do horizontal because that's probably what you're going to be wrestling with more often as you start to learn how all these fit together. Using this section that puts together the bright collection, as I called it. Let's take a copy of all of these images and let's apply Auto Layout. And remember the shortcut for that is Shift a. And when I do that, what it does by default is it sets the spacing. So let's change that to 40. So it's a little bit easier to see on the screen. And we can see that the default spacing mode for horizontal and vertical is not really hug. What that means is that if I copy and paste another image that's going to be added into that parent frame. So this is frame 63. So let's look at default horizontal till resizing. Resizing modes. You can see as I add items into it, it's just going to elongate the length of that thing. So what we should start to explore is how the fixed and the fill behaviors work. It take a copy and let's rename this to default. Let's have a look at fixed. So if I change this to fixed, what that means is that fixed parent frame also lay out still exists, but the size of this frame will stay the same. If I delete this thing and we've got one less item or even to less items. You can see that the size of that frame itself actually still retains the original size. And this is really important when putting together your layout. Because if I e.g. put this into a frame like this and change the background. Let's change that to slightly different color. Let's do darker one. You can see that it's fixed like this. And if I add auto-layout and try and move it into the center, all of the items, there's only three. So it's going to put those more towards the left side of this frame. And that might not be what you want to achieve. If I change this to hug, then you can see that that automatically centers itself. And one thing I can do here is if I just resize this frame here. If you notice and you kept a close eye. It went from the default of hugging whatever the size of the contents are, fixed. And now, when I mixed together the alignment in this new frame 63 parent frame, and this fixed frame with the three images, we've now got the hug behavior. The last behavior that I want to share with you is the fill container. And it's important to remember that fill container only works on a container inside another one. So you can see here I've got this fixed pair in the frame. Let's call this. What was it called? Fill container demo. And rename this apparent frame. If I change this one to fill, then you can see it now takes up the space of that parent frame so that make it larger. You can see that the spacing on the left and the right is the same. And I will make it smaller. The spacing, it matches that size and spacing as well. So these are really good to mix together. And as you start to play around with them, if you have your ad, if I add in another one, e.g. you can see this fills, but it overflows here because it's not hugging the contents. So that's probably the last thing to really make you aware of that contents here. The frame itself, the fill container demo. We'll take up the exact center space with equal spacing left and right. But the contents inside may overflow as I add more items into it. So depending what you might want, if I change that to hug again, then is more responsive and it takes up the space and wraps it evenly and nicely. So hopefully that was very useful for you as a very small but quick tutorial to show you how hug, fixed and fill container resizing behaviors work. 21. Spacing and spacing modes of Auto layout: In this part, we're gonna be looking at spacing and spacing modes. And the best way for me to explain this with a worked example is with a button or call to action, as well as using this example, which I used to explain the resizing modes. So to explain how this works, rebuilding the call to action is probably the quickest way. So if I hold down the Alt or Option key, as I drag the layer over, that means I'm taking a coffee and what I'll do is just change the color so we can see that taking this, one of the quick things you can do if you want to create a button or create something like I've done with the call to action here. Simply press Shift a, and that creates all to layout. And what that does if there's only one item, it defaults and sets the spacing between items to ten, as well as the horizontal padding and the vertical padding. So when it comes to spacing, what I mean by that is the padding that's on the top, bottom, left, and right of the items inside your auto layout group. So if I set a quick fill color, let's make this one. Let's go purple. I think purples, quite nice. Now I can change the color of the text again and make it a little bit easier to see. So let's do that doesn't seem to be working. So I'll change this like this. There we go. I select this again, add a border radius just to make it look more buttoning. And what you can see is that it looks okay by itself. But as you play with these values, you can use that to change the spacing that's around your items. So that can be useful depending on how you want your items to either flow automatically by using auto layout or how you want them to be displayed. If you're making a call to action like this, making something more like a button. You can also click on this thing over here to set individual padding. So let's say for some reason, I wanted to add like 50 spacing below because I just thought that'd be good. And here, if you remember, we've got the alignment. So if I align it to the center and the items inside, then that's not going to affect it. So it may not behave the way you intend. So I've done that accidentally, but I think this is actually a very good lesson. Where is the padding on the bottom that's going to dictate where it goes. So if I then change that to ten and then change the height of this thing, then you can see that the height becomes fixed and the padding is still here, top and bottom, then the items inside will flow between them. So that's a quick demo to go through the spacing. The last thing to go through is this basic modes. So out of habit, I think it's just nice to add a little shadow button because it just nicely round things off. If we remember from this or from one of the lessons, if you went through it, here, I've got this fill container demo, but everything doesn't lay itself out nicely. All it does is it aligns itself to the left. So it could align things into the center. You ever wanted the spacing between them to all be consistent. But sometimes you want them to fill up everything inside that frame. So what you can do is if I demonstrate how this works first, if I do this that stays in the center. I select this, fill a container demo. If I click on the three dots, you then get access to spacing mode. And using the space between that will make sure that the spacing between is automatically changed and automatically lays itself out. Am I doing that? That's a very simple one-click trick. That means that the spacing between is always even and consistent with each other. But takes up the space of the container that's using a fill container. Horizontal resizing or vertical resizing mode. So those are the concrete examples that you can use. And hopefully I've illustrated to you how to set the spacing on things, how to use fill container and set the spacing mode to something else. And hopefully use those to help achieve even better. Also lay out things by yourself. 22. Components: Masters and Instances: Great stuff. So we're going to jump straight in to components and the two things that you're going to need to be aware of, our masters and instances. And I'll show you what I mean with a concrete example. So for a small example, let's start with the humbled button using t to do a text layer. And I'll call it my button. And if you remember, we have our textiles. So look for the button style. So that's something I can use quite nicely. Then we can simply add auto-layout and that will by default give us some stuff that's pretty helpful. Give it a simple border radius and a fill. Let's pick this color. I do like this kind of bright type of color. And let me update that to this. So what you can do from here is now you have this button thing. But what if you want to use it several times? If I want to edit the contents or the color, let's say, and they update the color from this blue three to like a green. If I have to do that in a prototype, it's gonna go everywhere. And I'm going to have to go and change every single button. What you can do is if I undo that and delete these two. Actually, let's not, let me, let me copy this over. Let me turn that into a component. So there's two ways to do it. You can right-click and create a component, or I always use the shortcut Command Option key. And what that does is it creates what's called a master for a component. And you can see that by the little symbol here. So I don't think Zooming it seems to make a difference. But you can always look into the left side of your Layers panel. You can tell whether something is an instance is a master or not. And you can see by this purple highlighting, I copy it over. Now you'll notice that it doesn't have like a named level, even though it does actually have a name. And you can say that customer bottom, Let's call the bottom. And if I update the label to your button, all the changes propagate. Now this is one of the most powerful things that you can use using components in Figma. And not just that, there's so many more things you can do. But if you can nail the basics here of masters and instances with components, you're golden. So as another example, just to give you an idea, I can customize my instance over here. And even if I update this to they're button, that's only going to update the instances where I haven't overridden what the defaults are. And you can see this again where if I change the color of this e.g. so I'll change the color to yellow, e.g. now of a change the color of the original one, the yellow will remain, but the bottom button will change to purple. So that's kinda like the, the update cycle kinda works between a master and an instance. And you can always tell some things in instance because it's purple in terms of the outline as well as the little symbol. You'll see in the layers panel, which is an empty diamond. There's only, the only other things you may want to know is that there's so many other things that are shareable when you set up your components. So when you set it up, it's not just the fill and the text content. There's things like the opacity as well. So I said that's 50 per cent. That actually propagates all the way throughout those like the border or the stroke, I should say. The so many different things that you can set up on your component. And this is quite a simple one where it's only a single text layer, but you can add so many different things inside it. So I could e.g. add two texts things and change that back to 100% opacity. And you can see like with two text layers, I can say here's button and change this to her bus. And so that you can see that from a simple button example, you can start to build on top of this. And I do encourage you to experiment and try and get all of these updates going back-and-forth and make sure you're comfortable with what things you can set from your masters and what things get propagated down to your instance and what things will save themselves. Not be affected by master updates. 23. Component nesting: Next, we're going to build on top of that example by doing component nesting. So it sounds exactly like it does on the tin. You're pretty much putting components inside either other components and two other frames. Over here. I've done a little bit of preparation ahead of time. So it made a little avatar thing. And they just 50 by 50 pixels, just using the ellipse tool for the head and for the body as well, and just squishing it down. And I've got two texts layers here just using the header six style as well as the body one style. And we have the bus and from the previous lesson. So what you can do from here is if I take an instance of this, do make sure you take an instance, then you can take the other stuff you might want. Auto-layout to that. Remember the shortcut for that is the letter a. And we'll make that zero between that. And what I'll do is I'll take a copy of this button. I'll just change the contents of a view, e.g. now, if I alter, lay out this leaving center, which is good for me, I wanted to reduce that. As an example. Give it, let's say ten spacing all the way around. Just to make it look like a card. Let's call it white, gray six. Actually, I wanna do white, so it's easier for you to see hopefully, and border-radius is normal. And from here, now we have a basic prototype for a card thing. What you can do is Command Option key to turn into component. Or remember, you can always right-click on something. You can turn a frame into a component. Just rename this to a profile card row, let's say. Now we've got a good master, where within this master component, the profile card row, we have two components, the avatar and regular, and this button component. Now, if I take an instance of this, if I'm putting together a screen, I can take a few different copies of this. Let's add auto-layout and call that 20 between each row. And now if I make updates to this, so e.g. if I change the selection colors of the profile to green. Let me, I might have to dig into this for some, for some reason. There we go. Now you can see that those changes now propagate. So you can see that even just using components as powerful, but by nesting your components and by understanding the update cycle between them, you can really compose together your designs and your layouts and things that you want to communicate really, really quickly. 24. Variants and Properties: So this last major lesson I have to teach you is all about variants and Eve components weren't powerful, powerful enough. Variants are a way to make loads of things customizable and tell global rather than creating lots of sets of components. So take an example where you might want to have many different button styles. And in the past, you used to have to create every single style. So you'd have to create buttons of default color, every color with icons without a cons of different sizes. And that just grows exponentially. So the variants that can reduce that down to a nice, really small, easy usable set of components with lots of configurable toggles. So we'll do a worked example together to show you how that fits, how that fits and can be achieved. Here in Figma billing from the previous example, what I've done is I've duplicated the profile card row and I've renamed them. So this is to make it easy when you set up variance. So variance are generally anything where they have something similar. So let's build another one now which is a little bit taller, and then add some shadow just to visually distinguish it from all of the other ones. So e.g. you might want to be swapping something out and that's something you just added or something like that. If I hold down Alt or you can right-click copy and paste as normal. And what we need to do is detach this instance because we want to turn that from an instance into its own master. And let's rename this highlighted. And we can do something simple. Let's just increase the height or the default effect, which is a shadow. And Command Option key or right-click turn to component, and there you go. So what we wanna do from here is if you select multiple components, you'll see over here on the right, there's this thing called combined as variance. So when I do that, you can see what that's automatically done. So Figma now recognizes this as one singular component, but has many different styles. So you can see here we've opened up this window with the properties and let me rename that style. And we can see that there's a few different styles there. You've got default ever an highlighted. So that's very handy just to inspect what's different in there. And you can do all sorts of really cool things. I'll give you a quick preview of what you can actually do. Now that we've done that with this, this variant, we can now swap any existing instance to one of those highlighted things. Now, you can start to see the power that not only can we nest components and start to propagate changes back and forth. But we can actually add in the ability to toggle things retrospectively. And now these different styles. And as long as we're using a frame nesting, and as long as we're using our Auto Layout, a lot of things can come together very quickly. To give you an intro and a round off to the other things you can do is gonna be around the property styles. So I'll give you a quick preview of all of these. Variant is the default one that you get set. So that's usually good for states and styles. Boolean is good if you want to hide something. I usually like to use a question mark. So e.g. title. So we can say showTitle a high title. What I can do is go into that layer. And what I'll need to do is use this thing where I can apply a Boolean property. And so by default, that is true if I connect all of these up. So this is where it's probably good to note that it's good to set down your component and just work with two or maybe three before hooking them all up. Now on these, I now have this little toggle where it can turn the title on and off. So some other things that you can do, There's also the instance swap and the text texts e.g. I. Can just go into here. And for content we can look that up. So text type of texts. Now for all of these, I should be able to, because I've only looked at that one, I can change this to their title. And that updates automatically. And the last thing is instance swap. So that means you can swap between two different components. So here what I'm gonna do is link this component as an instance swap and it's button. And what I'm going to ask people to do, the preferred swaps I would like you to make. In terms of making design system is going to be this. Now, you can see I can swap between Button and link. 25. Tips for modelling components: So here, building on top of those variants and properties, There's a couple of quick tips that I want to give you just to make your life that little bit easier, further down the line as you figure out how to model things. So I do encourage you to actually sit down and practice and try and play around and create some things, make some mistakes so that you can remember and cement that knowledge in your head. But here's a few quick shortcuts as well that can help fast-forward the learning. Okay, So the first thing is around the sizing of stuff when you're doing an instance swap. So this is building off top of what we went through previously. You can see that the height of this button is 39 pixels, whereas this link is 19. So if I change that to 19 and actually put the text layer right in the middle. Oh, actually I have to do it like this. Don't I arrange the texts layer. Then when you do the instance swap, it's usually that little bit easier when you swap out things. So you can see that if you can match the size of the thing, that's usually better. So icons are good, for instance, swap that sort of thing. It's really good to be mindful of how things are put together and how what styles are applied to auto-layout and the sizing, that sort of thing. The next thing is the quick tips around not necessarily Boolean, but using the toggles. So as I select this, we can see that I can select the style with the dropdown, so that's good. Using the variant property, you've got the title, which is done by a Boolean. You've got the text property and the instance while property here. But also what you can do is I will delete this so that we've only got two. And I'll rename style from style to highlight it. And what you'll notice is that with this diamond, that actually still means it's a variant type property. But if I change the styles from or highlight or should I say, from, let's say false to true. Then automatically Figma can recognize that and it's tearing that highlighted from the drop-down into a toggle. So that's really helpful. And some other things that you can do is instead of false, you can also say yes and no. I'm not sure if you can. You can't mix them so you can use true and false, yes and no. So those are the types that you can use them here, true and false will work. Yes and no work. And those will put those together. So those are just some little things that I've noticed over time, building components myself and trying to assemble them together. And that really helped me dictate and figure out what's the best way to model and express this thing. So that it's easier for my teammates and for other people to use the stuff that I've put together and creates it. 26. Checkpoint: responsive components: Amazing. So we've nearly everything that we need in order to truly, truly be able to be very fast and very free and be able to express all the things that we want and stitch together different prototypes as quickly as we can think, which is what really drew me to the Figma tool and why I really still love it, using it all day everyday. So in this module, we're going to really talk about responsive design and responsive components. And we're going to look at it from two angles. First, we will look at methods to making things responsive in Figma. The next we're going to talk about who they're responsive for. So when I talk about responsive components and Figma and that sort of thing, I'm normally thinking about the designers. So how can I make life easy for myself, for my teammates in order for them to be able to stitch together prototypes very quickly and be able to adjust those mockups so that we can deliver at the pace we need to. But there's also responsive design. So we'll touch upon responsive design very briefly. This is not a course to help you learn the fundamentals of responsive web design, but we'll touch upon it and how Figma can help you get there. 27. Responsive modelling methods: Building upon what we did in one of the previous lessons, I've just taken one of our components that we built together. I've also done another one, and I haven't set it up completely yet. But just to illustrate the differences between the two ways to model components for responsivity. So first, this frame nesting an auto layout. So what you notice is that as I grow and shrink this particular component, the size of stuff, the view button stays to the right. What you'll notice is that we'll fix this in a moment, but the view button also goes on top of the text. So that's somewhat responsive with this constraints version. What I've done instead is that if you remember, I framed the text layers together and apply it also layout and apply to all to lay out to the entire card itself. So the horizontally, it would have ultimately applied always with the constraints model. I've just put everything inside. So you've got your avatar, your title, and the body content, and the button. And what you can do is you can change the constraints of these things in relation to where it fits on its parent frame. And it's really important that as the frame as well, because I think it works a little bit differently with groups, but we'll stick to frames because frames are good. Remember, now that I've done that, if I then grow and shrink this, it now behaves exactly as the other one does. So it'd be asking like, what's the difference between these two? And some other stuff you can do. So you can see here I've got this frame and the horizontal resizing is set to fill. But what we haven't done yet is set the horizontal resizing on the title and the body needs to fill. What you'll notice is that now when I shrink this, the text automatically wraps around. You can see as I shrink that, then the everything goes to the center of that card. And if I don't like that, I can adjust where everything goes. I can use the alignment. Don't forget from the auto layout and change those settings until I'm happy. What you'll notice is that if I do something similar, I can do is do this and change the width, the width of these, all the way to here, to the end. I can also change this constraint to left and right. So I do encourage you as always, to experiment and play around with these settings to see how they all fit together. As I do this, you can see that the text now changes. And so what you'll notice as well is that the background hasn't changed to wrap around it. And this is where the differences start to appear. Where there's a lot of things that we'll be doing. Very basic stuff to make them responsive. They kind of work. But if you want things to wrap around things and to work kind of like this, you do need some also layout. That's not to say you can't mix both of them. So whilst these are two independent approaches, it's very good for you to try and experiment and mix and match what you need. So there's an example for this one. I may not want the avatar to actually be in the center. Actually want it to be at the top. So what I can do is if I detach this just to make it easier because I need to set things up. And inside, you can see that all of these things inside are set to scale. So if I set all of them to be to the left and to the top, e.g. now, when I change the height, I can actually change the height to be filled container. So this means that the avatar and the text will align themselves up more nicely and more naturally. Whereas if I tried to do that before, you can see that it stretches like this and just scales. Um, so I think these are good enough examples for you to have a look at and to dissect and start playing with and what you'll appreciate and start to, what you want you'll benefit from is actually playing with these settings so you can get a feel for how all of these things fit together. I think from here, the only last thing to mention is with the auto layout and making things responsive. Do try to stick to one axis. So don't try and make it vertically responsive, as well as holidays horizontally responsive. You'll see that when I shrink and I've done this, I've really only worked on the horizontal axis. But as soon as I start changing the height of this starts to not really look great and starts to fall apart. So that's good to keep in mind, try and stick to one axis and experiment with these two different styles of making components responsive. 28. Responsive for designers: So when it comes to designing responsively, but for designers, Here's exactly what I mean. So when we take this as an example, let's say I'm using some of these profile card rows. And I want to line them all up. So I'm trying to line them up like this and get the heading up. Just write whatever I want to add in something different to the middle. Let's say I've got one of these components, let's say. And I'll zoom in. And if I want to put it into here, I'd have to select these, move them down, and then I need to double-check the spacing. So you've probably already noticed or what you picked up from one of the previous lessons hopefully, is that if I select them all and use auto layout, that comes to the rescue. And that is something that I can do to make my life easier. So here you can see if I do this and change all of the things inside to fill horizontal resizing, then if I do this and maybe change the size of fixed, which is fine. Let's say 349 because we're working on 375 screen. And here I can adjust the height of stuff. And not only that, I can rearrange stuff if I need to, without a problem. I'm even, even more. I can add another section and I can say, I'm going to add this and plop it onto the screen and put it into here. And if I set everything up right, what you'll notice and what you've probably started to gather is that you're using multiple frames within frames is actually not a problem as long as you manage them carefully and each frame should serve a purpose and do something. So you can see there where I've just added also layout onto there. Not too much, it's changed, but now I've got those contexts and other contacts. And let's say you're inside design critique, so you're working professionally and you've got some of the designers or stakeholder. And they say Actually I think the, my other contact should go to the top. And let's pretend for a moment that the contents inside of these are different. I can simply just move around. And it's a straightforward is that even, even more, I can take a copy of this and let's say let's design it for tablet, right? So if I do this, this is fixed. But what I've set up here for the navbar, Let's just make it feel container. Now you can see automatically actually, this layout doesn't work too well. Maybe we should make them side-by-side. So if I then group these, shift a to do auto layout and put them side-by-side. And let's keep it at 30. You can see automatically that trying to design. As a designer when I've got components that are responsive in this way, makes my life so much more easy. And it makes things so quick to do and to update. Because if everything was just a layer on top, yes, it is a little bit frustrating sometimes to go, here's my mainframe and designing for iPad. And I've got my contents. I have to go into this frame. And this frame, which is this column, then go into this component and then make some tweaks. But if you build up your, your Figma file and your designs as a composition, really, all of these things inside should just be components that are quite easy to select and to tinker with with the properties that you may have set up or to swap it out with something else. Then you can automatically see that by resizing things. If I then change these from fixed to fill as well, which you'll gather, this becomes a very common behavior and muscle memory that you build up over time. Now I can adjust it and I can start to play with all the different layouts and things and start to see how my design you might behave for real. So that's something I definitely suggest and that kinda gives you a sense of trying to design, but make things responsive for you as a designer. And it's really important to look after yourself and make your life easy. 29. Responsive web design: So we'll touch upon really briefly when it comes to designing responsive websites. And I do this intentionally because again, this is just to get you up to speed and working fluidly in Figma, not to teach you how to do responsive web design, but if you did want to explore it and kind of understand how I came to these decisions. So it does seem pretty sensible to align these side-by-side. But how does it all fit together and how do we make those things? So the history of it very briefly all comes down to layout and the two things we want to look at, our containers in columns. So by container, what we mean is that a fixed thing in the center of the screen. You'll notice that if we have a hypothetical iPad and stretched it out like this, there is a maximum size it should go to. If I shrink that again, what I've done is set up a layout grid as well. And if I use Control G, and that can toggle that on here, what I'm using 0s, basic 12 column system, which is pretty standard. And what you'll notice is that it's not perfectly aligned, but it's enough to give you an idea that okay, everything is in the center. So if I rename this, this could be container. And if I shrink these, we've got this left column and right column. So let's call this Column six. And let's call this Column six as well. And that's because when working with bootstrap as an example in many other front-end layout frameworks and systems, they use a twelv column system and they set the size of things using 12 columns. And you can set them up components to meet the size of everything. Amongst that size. If you get my drift. So we've got columns six takes up six columns on the left, and the other one takes six columns on the right. You could adjust it and you could change the split. So one takes three columns and the other one takes nine. You could even do odd numbers that don't fit when setting up things and doing responsive web design. You can see that here. Actually, I should adjust these things here. So I've got these things, the icon, Let's rename that to make that easier. And this B is white. My logo is white. So if I want to lay out dab it, change it to fixed width and shrink this down to roughly the same size. And then if I call that container, then that's fine. That's fine. This should actually be like do we have, if you change that to space between, then gives you a rough idea of how things should really work and fit together. So this container concept, you can read more on, Get Bootstrap and just look for containers. And then looking at columns, you can look at getbootstrap and look at columns. So the documentation is pretty good, I would say. And what you'll find is that for this hypothetical iPad, if I then make it super wide. So I have an ultra widescreen, e.g. which is 21 by nine in ratio. You'll see that actually a lot of websites don't know how to use that. Or if we let it split across the whole thing would actually be pretty uncomfortable to read. So I said this and just set it to fill a container. That's pretty horrendous, isn't it? So we just turn off those grids for a moment. Again, with control G, You can see that's kind of difficult to see and read and it's so much nicer sustain the middle. So this container gives you a maximum size for where things should go to the columns, gives you a system for how things are laid out onto the page, which comes from a history of print design. Very interesting. I do recommend reading it. And that should give you enough of an idea of how these things fit together. Unfortunately, Figma doesn't really like model of them. Like for like, you can't get components changing as the screen size changes. But that's okay. There's some things that can mimic it quite close. But remember Figma as a tool to give you an idea and communicate your intention for the different screen sizes. And then it's up to you to close that gap when speaking with your engineers. And you can definitely learn a lot. And I think it makes your life easier if you learn how it's actually done for real encode. Because at the end of the day, that's where your user sees, not your Figma files. 30. Prototype interactions: So we've touched upon clickable prototypes previously. But now let's do it for real. Let's get a really good end-to-end work, an example to help you figure out how to do it as well. So over here I've built off some of the previous examples from the previous modules and lessons to build out a very basic e-commerce type of flow. So I'm taking the microwaves direct idea and I put together a little selector thing where you can choose between two microwave Styles and choose between two different colors before you proceed over to the basket screen and then go to the beginning of the checkout. So let's jump right into it. To begin, the easiest thing to do is to click on the prototypes have in the top-right. And from there, what you'll see as I go across different layers is there's this little circle that pops up across these different layers. And when you select your layer, that's going to be the easiest way for you to create a prototype interaction. So if the page that you're working on doesn't have an existing flow, you'll notice a couple of things here. There were no prototype interactions before. And when I drag this over, that creates it and interaction. And the two things to note first is that this created a flow that you can see in the top-left named flow one, which you can edit over here, but at the interaction details. So by default this is gonna be on click, but if there's an existing interaction, it'll default to the next one. So it will go to on drag. Then while hovering, while pressing, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to stick to unclick today. But I'm going to I'm going to leave you with some exercises to explore the other ones. So if we go to unclick and navigate, and I want it to be instant, and there's not much else I want to do. So I'll just click Close and that'll keep that there. What I can do from here is click on all of the different things that I want to navigate between. So with the selector as I go between the different ones, I want this to happen. What I'm gonna do here is enabled smart animate. And that will make it appear as if it's more interactive than it was. So make it look more real, I think is what I'm trying to say. So if we go through here and go through this, just go through the different ones. You can see that if you've prepared your screens and flows ahead of time, connecting all up is relatively straightforward. Let's take a moment and do this and make sure I've done most of them. And you can see that once I change the settings, for which one is this b? This one, wouldn't it? Once I change the settings on there, it continued to keep the last known settings that I put. So that's pretty helpful. We'll go here. You can connect this up to here. Okay, Great stuff. So just hook those up altogether. So each one should have to interactions going to one of the other screens. From there. I want to get this one just for illustrative purposes. The alternative and the white style, which is this one. And get the add to basket button. And look that up over here. So I'll move this back to instant. And so that is more natural. And from here, I can do this and do this. The only other thing that you may want to know is also the unclick. You can go back. So it'll go to the previous screen or the previous interaction. So it doesn't seem so interesting right now. But that's very useful if you want to undo or if you have lots of different complex float. So those are the core things that you want to be aware of. So that's pretty much how you set up all your interactions. I'm just going to open this up real quick. Let's rename this flow. Flow. Click through. And you should be able to see in a moment how that all fits together. As we scroll, we can see here, build my microwave and the Smart Animate. You can see it flips between them. How cool is that? So select these two at the basket, takes us to here, then I can proceed to purchase and back to basket takes us back there. Short, clean, simple example and helps you stitch them together. As an instructor prototype. 31. Multiple flows: We created one flow in the previous lesson. But what if you want to share multiple flows? One of you want to test two different conditions against each other. So I'm going to give you a quick introduction and an overview of how to do that. First, what you want to notice in the preview is that when you click, you can see a couple of different controls. In the top left here. This is going to be what's most useful for you. You can see all the different flows that you put together. So here we've got the single flow that we put together, my flow. But what do we want to put together? Another one? It's quite simple. Let's say we start from the checkout for whatever reason. And you can simply, in this prototype tab, if you haven't selected it or you've clicked off of it, make sure you select onto the Prototype tab again. Then if you click on the flow starting point, you can do the checkout flow condition and give that a name. Then the prototype goes from there. So they're pretty much just bookmarks where you can go from an IT could click on here or click on the play button in the top right. What you'll see is that for anybody that's got the file open and can see the prototype, they can see those things as well. So if I click onto my flow, that takes us back to the beginning of the flow that we built earlier. It could go through, build my microwave and click between the different things. Or if I want to work on the different flow and start directly from somewhere else, we've come over here and you can see that this takes us straight to the basket. There you go. 32. Sharing prototypes: Now that you've got a clickable prototype and you've put together the flows that you want to share with people. Now you're going to want to share that with somebody who is either remote or let's say you're working from home or you have someone that's working in a different office geographically and you want to share that with them. So here's all the things that you're going to want to know in order to share your prototype in the best light possible. So before we get to the links, there's three things I wanted to pull onto your radar. They are the blue hotspots, the zoom level, and showing and hiding the UI. Because whatever settings that you select in here, we'll bake itself into that share link that you then share them with your friends, colleagues, or whoever you want to share that with. So it's very important to get these settings correct before you generate that share link. Here in the top right, you can see a few different things. So by default, show hotspot hints. Onclick is always activated. So if I do this, you can see that there's an area of the screen that highlights in blue. So sometimes you might want to turn that off. If you don't want to give people hints and make it feel more realistic, it's not something that you can toggle on and off from here. Next is the zoom level. Here. It's quite a good size, but you want to make sure that the Zoom is the right size for what you want to share. So Fit to Screen is one of the formats you can use. That's good for presentations. You've kind of got fit width. So it expands until the maximum size of your screen is large enough, it will just simply show at 100%. You've also got Fill Screen, which is kinda similar to fit to screen. Well there's actual size. So depending how you've set up your prototype and what resolution that you've got a can change how a prototype is seen by the person receiving it. So if I squish this down, It's not going to work, is it? Okay, let's not squish that down. Anyway. Long story short when trying to say do change the zoom options until you're happy with how it's displayed. Before you actually send that over to somebody. The last one is showing and hiding the interface. So someone who loves this up, we'll get this as well, this bar. And if you open this up, that will be visible to what you may want to do is to show or hide the Figma UI. So it's got this funny symbol here. But the shortcut I use is the command and backspace, but backslash button, sorry, or the pipe symbol, which is just like a vertical line. The click this. You can see that it's hidden the UI. And when I click about, I can't see anymore for me to bring that up again, command, pipe, backslash character, and then I can see all of the UI things again. Once you've set that up, then you should go to the Share Prototype link. So that's why you can see there's a copy share link that pops up at the bottom. Because if you hide the UI, you can't actually see the share button. But from here, that's probably something that you're going to want to do. If we jump into here, I can show you what the URL looks like. If we zoom in, you can see, you can usually use this to double-check yourself. Here, this URL options, so I'll keep it as accessible for you as possible. But for hiding the UI, e.g. you can see here it's added an option and high DUI, and it's one. If I want that to actually show itself, I could change that to zero, e.g. and you can see here it's baked in the scaling option as well for the Zoom, those are all the important options that you'll need to be aware of. And once you share the link, the last thing you will want to do is when you share prototype, make sure that anyone with the link can view it and then copy the link. You can send it by e-mail to Pete them. You can add people's emails or Figma accounts, but I find it most useful just to set it to anyone with the link and copy the link and send that to somebody. So that covers all the things you will want to know about sharing a Figma prototype and any flows that you'll want to do and user testing or share some ideas with your friends, colleagues, family, whomever you want to share with your dog. Maybe e.g.