Note: If you have a different UI than in the course, you can change it back by clicking the '?' in the bottom right corner of Figma and select 'Go back to previous UI'. Happy Figma'ing!

Abstract Gradient Background in Figma the easy way

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Course contents

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Course info

177 lessons / 16 hours 46 quiz questions 21 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, aspiring Figma enthusiasts! Are you ready to embark on an exhilarating journey with me, Dan Scott, as we unlock the full potential of our Figma skills in the dazzling realm of UX/UI Design using Figma Advanced?

Try Figma for free by clicking here.

This course is tailor-made for those who have already mastered the fundamental principles of UI/UX Design using Figma. If you've triumphed over my Figma Essentials course or have a sneaking suspicion that there's a treasure trove of unexplored tools, tips, workflows, and updates awaiting your discovery, then look no further! This course is your golden ticket to taking your UI/UX prowess to the next level.

Together, we'll start by delving into the depths of multilevel nested autolayouts, and unravel the secrets used by UX professionals by learning:
- Workflow techniques, managing design assets, styles, components, grid and column layouts like true virtuosos.
- Learn how to use Variables and put them to work creating even more complete prototypes.
- Use variables to make Light & Dark Modes + Compact & Comfortable spacing versions of your components. 
- You’ll then take your new knowledge of variables to understand and create your own Design Tokens. 
  • - Unleashing the magic of advanced animation techniques, captivating users with animated background gradients and Houdini Text.
  • - Harness the power of Lottie animation files, breathing life into your designs.
  • - Crafting responsive elements that effortlessly adapt to any device, proving your design prowess knows no bounds.
  • - Unleashing the full potential of powerful images & video masking techniques, amplifying the visual impact of your creations.
  • - Mastering advanced typography features, transforming words into captivating works of art.
  • - Embracing the realm of AI, infusing your process with its genius to elevate your skills as a UX designer.
  • - Elevate your prototyping game, conducting user tests with finesse using advanced techniques.
  • - Unveiling sticky scroll buttons that stack, animated anchor points and booleans, and a host of other captivating effects.
  • - Creating enchanting dropdown menus, hover grow effects for images, and expanding search bars.
  • - Discovering the right accessibility tools & techniques, ensuring inclusivity and usability for all users.
  • - Becoming a variant boss, expertly taming unwieldy variants to just 1 or 2.
  • - Unveiling the secrets of seamless collaboration with designers, developers, and stakeholders.
  • - Mastering the art of exporting production-ready assets, bringing your designs to life beyond the realm of Figma.
  • - Unearthing professional workflow tricks & shortcuts, saving you precious time and skyrocketing your efficiency.
  • - Plus much more exciting advanced Figma goodness along the way!

As you journey through this course, you'll acquire the skills wielded by UX professionals, gaining a profound understanding of the UX Design industry. From concept to a highly polished finish, you'll confidently manage your own UX projects ideal for your portfolio.

Throughout the course, I'll assign assignments and projects that nurture your skills and empower you to create your very own unique UX design masterpiece for your portfolio. Don’t worry if this all seems overwhelmingly advanced right now, because the BYOL crew stands ready to support and guide you, ensuring your questions get answered.

It's time to embrace the call to upgrade yourself and transcend from being a good UX Designer to a bona fide Figma UX Superhero! Unlock your potential, save the day, and let your design prowess soar!

Requirements:

- A copy of Figma (a free plan is available on the Figma website).
  • - Basic knowledge of Figma is required. I recommend watching my Figma Essentials course prior to embarking on this epic adventure.

Who this course is for:

  • - UX/UI adventurers who already have a basic understanding of Figma.
  • - Self-taught Figma enthusiasts yearning for structured guidance.
  • - Graduates of my Figma Essentials Course, hungry for more knowledge and skills.
  • - Visionaries who have developed their own unique Figma approach but crave exploration of the vast universe of tools, updates, and time-saving techniques.

What you'll learn:

  • - Diving deep into multi level nested autolayouts. 
  • - Robust components that are easy to update and hard to break. 
  • - Component properties. 
- Variables
- Design Tokens
- Advanced Prototyping using Variables
  • - Learn Workflow tips and tricks for managing your design assets, styles, components, grid and column layouts.
  • - Advanced animation techniques
  • - Animated Background gradients. 
  • - Houdini Text
  • - Animate along a path in Figma
  • - How to add Lottie animation files in Figma
  • - Build responsive elements ready for any device size.
  • - The best shortcuts & plugins to make you a more efficient UX designer.
  • - Absolute Positioning of Autolayouts. 
  • - Powerful images & video masking techniques. 
  • - Advanced typography features. 
  • - Learn to use AI in your process to make you a better UX designer. 
  • - Advanced prototyping techniques to level up your user tests. 
  • - Make prototypes better and faster using tricks & shortcuts. 
  • - Sticky scroll buttons that stack. 
  • - Video playback controls. 
  • - Animated anchor points and booleans.
  • - Create a Dropdown menu
  • - Create a hover grow effect for images.
  • - Create and expanding Search Bar 
  • - Learn the right accessibility tools & techniques  
  • - Become a variant boss. Cutting down those 100 variants to just 1 or 2. 
  • - Learn the best ways to work with other designers, developers and stakeholders. 
  • - Build a UX project from beginning to end ready for your portfolio.
  • - Export production ready assets.
  • - Learn professional workflow tricks & shortcuts.
  • - Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.
  • - All the techniques used by UX professionals
  • - 160 videos of detailed Figma Advanced Content.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

How to earn your certificate

Work your way towards your certificate for this course by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz (Merit level courses only)
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project (Distinction level courses only) - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Request your certificate when you've completed the requirements for the certificate level you're working towards

Good luck!

Pass certificates

We’re awarding ‘Pass’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Pass’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when all your projects are complete

Good luck!

Merit certificates

We’re awarding ‘Merit’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Merit’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Distinction certificates

We're awarding 'Distinction' level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your 'Distinction' certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Don't forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi everyone, we're going to make this little gradient... blurry background animation thing... we're going to be kind of borrowing it... from this site here, stripe.com... everyone loves this, animated gradient, can you see it moving the background... we are going to do it the quick and easy, and dirty way...

to start with, we're just going to animate an image... mainly to flex our animation skills... remind ourselves of all those things we did in the Essentials course... make sure we're all at the same place... and we'll get more and more advanced with gradient meshes and good stuff... loads of good shortcuts in here as well...

but yeah, let's go make this in Figma. Let's start by making our Welcome screen, we're going to do it down here... 'F' key, I'm going to use the phone, iPhone 14, going to go in a random spot... I'm going to start him down here, I'm going to give him a name... it's going to be my "Welcome Screen"... this is going to be "Welcome Screen 01"...

we're going to do frame by frame in this animation... and then I'll show you how to do it fancier in an upcoming one. I want all the details from this, so I'm going to go... I'm going to select this Frame... because I want the rounded corners and the background color... so I'm going to go 'Command Option C' for copy, that's 'Ctrl Alt C' on a PC...

and those same keys, plus 'V'... will give me my background color, and give me my rounded corners, nice. Let's use a plugin... now there's a couple of plugins to get the abstract picture we're going to use... we're going to animate that picture instead of doing them all separate... which we'll do in a little bit, start the easy way, get more complicated.

Now I'm just going to use Unsplash, and just get... commercial use images for this one get an abstract background... if you type in "gradient" in the search... you'll find there's a lot of gradient makers... up to you how custom you want to go... not really required because we can draw our own gradients...

but let's just start with an image... so Unsplash, and I'm going to use 'Abstract'... and I'm just going to use this first one. Now I don't want to put it in the background of this... because I want to animate it... so I don't want it to be a background of this screen...

so I'm going to grab my 'F' tool, for a frame... draw it bigger than my phone, because I want to kind of move it around in there... with it selected, click on that, and let's see, there we go... actually, I probably want to be able to see all the different colors... so I can move it around... and I need to close down my plugin...

and I need to make sure it's inside the frame... so you, it's kind of done the wrong one... because I drew the frame around the phone... kind of mixed it up, so I'm going to drag it above... I'm not, Welcome screen, get out of there, please, there it is. Can you see the little line that appears, so it won't do it again now...

so inside, outside, there we go, and you can go inside now... there's a better one, can you see the little line there... the editor will zoom in, look, outside, inside. This frame is going to be called "Gradient", let's add some text... now I've added some text, the one thing that happened is... it automatically put it inside of the frame that I call Gradient...

just because I drew inside of it... so I'm going to drag it out so that it is not inside the gradient... it is just alongside it, and I need it to be above, here we go. So I'm going to have two of these, 'Command D', or 'Ctrl D' on a PC... it's renamed it nicely, 1, 2, Screen 2... now I just need to change them, so I'm going to click on the gradient itself...

and you can do anything, just the subtle small rotation... looking at the wrong one, I want this one... and I want, what am I going to do? I'm going to move it... and I'm going to rotate a little bit... and probably scale it a little bit as well.

Another trick here is to connect these two up with, 'Shift 2'... I want to switch over to Prototype... so we're going to learn a shortcut have we done it yet? I'm not sure, 'Shift E'... Shift E toggles between Design and Prototypes, probably... once you get to this kind of later stage in a design...

you end up toggling between the two loads ... there are different shortcuts for it, use those if you know it... but Shift E is just a good toggle, so be on Prototype... click on this frame here, and I want to say, you go to this one... and you might have the same problem as me... I've never noticed this before this course...

but with this big background image in here I can't grab that little dot... it keeps jumping to the-- '-', '-'... you can see, it's jumping to the outside frame. So what I am going to do right now is I'm going to select on that Gradient 01... and I'm just going to lock it, which is 'Command Option L', 'Ctrl Alt L'  it is not, it's 'Command Shift L'... so 'Command Shift L', 'Ctrl Shift L' on a PC...

is it a shortcut you use loads? I'll add it to the shortcuts sheet... just means, now, it's not going to try and click on it... so now, you see, there's my little dot that I wanted, you, go there... what I want you to do, not On Tap, 'After a Delay'... hang around a bit, how long?

I actually want to just get it to zip over... I don't want it to wait on the screen very long... I just want to get straight over here... but how does it get there, not instantly, I wanted to get device Smart Animate... and Smart Animate's going to just... look at the things that have changed and animate between them...

and in our case the text hasn't changed but the background image has... how long do I want it to go? Let's just leave it as the default and have a little look. Another shortcut we're going to learn through this course... is 'Ctrl Alt Enter', the Enter key on your keyboard is to preview... another really handy one, too much shortcuts, okay...

it's all right, I'll try and, I don't know, introduce them better. Can you see this one here, let's have a look, I'm going to go back one... took a while to load, that's why I didn't see it, and it's just not very nice... if yours jumped to some other page... what you need to make sure is when you hit Preview... just have that first screen selected, then hit Preview...

and what I need to do is I need this animation here to go from, not Delay... well, go from Smart Animate, I'm going to Ease In and Out because it looks nice... and how long? There is 1000 milliseconds in a second... so I want to go like 5 seconds, even longer, let's try 50 seconds... so you can hit the 'Play' button if you're not sure where the presenters...

you can see the shortcut there... but we're going to use 'Command Option P', 'Ctrl Alt P'... that opens the last plugin... so the same two keys, but use Enter, not P, Dan, come on... all right, let's preview it. It takes a while to load that giant image...

so in my case I can't just like let it go... because it's like half stuck between this, so I'm going to hit 'Back' button... looks like it's animating, and moving, and doing stuff... look at that, cool, huh. We didn't actually have to do much, two frames, somebody else's image... really easy to implement as well on the development side...

it's just an image moving... a little bit of scale and rotation, which is easy to do. All right, that is it, I'm going to add a bit more pizzazz... by selecting this one, going to hit 'Command D' to get another version of it... and with this one here I want to loop back to the beginning... first of all I'm going to have to start locking some of these...

actually, I need to animate this gradient before I lock it... and I'm going to try and guess something cool, but oh, good point... how do I get it from stop jumping around, what's going on? Does anybody remember the shortcut to kind of stick things inside the frame? That's right, once you start dragging, hold 'space bar'... and then it will stay in that frame...

"Oh, what a great use of that shortcut, Dan"... I pretend like that was part of my notes there... yeah, that's good enough... did I rotate it? I can't remember, scale it as well... I need to make sure that you...

go to Prototype mode, I can't quite see that dot again, why? Oh, it's that thing in the background, this doesn't normally happen... let me know in the comments if you're like... "Yeah, it's happening to me too," or, "It's just you, Dan"... so I'm selecting my gradient in this one, who remembers the shortcut? That's right, 'Command shift L' for locking...

you'll never remember them all, that's okay... I'm going to do my best to like beat them into you... let's lock them all... the locking icon, you can just click that, obviously, as well... and now I want to say, you... I can't really see the dot, I can see the dot, there we go...

it's just a little bit hard to see. Make sure you remember the last thing you did... did I do 10,000 seconds, or did I do 10 seconds, no, I did 50, didn't I? No, it didn't... you cannot do that high, watch this... there we go, we all learned something today.

I just think you go as high as you want, nope, 10 seconds... so let's do that, and I want it to loop back to the beginning... so I want you just to go back to there when it's finished, using the same things. Let's hope this looks good, click on the first screen... 'Command Option Return', 'Ctrl Alt Enter' on a PC... sometimes I've got to give this thing a bit of a jiggle...

go back to my first screen... kind of doing stuff, it's changing color, it's moving around slowly, gradually... there's just an image moving around, which is quite cool... and it's not quite working, let's debug it... why are you getting there and stopping, so goes, you... you, you, did this one...

go back to that screen, Smart Animate you, 'On Tap', a-ha... 'After Delay', did it do the same one on this one... "Is any of this working, Dan?"  you, 'On Tap'... and image, well, it's working... good work, Dan. The other thing that might be different from yours...

you might have seen all of your screens when you went into here... and it might have launched on some random screen instead of that first one here... when you hit 'Back' button it grabs them all... so just remember that you can actually select this first screen... and start a flow, you can say--  it sometimes does it automatically, sometimes it doesn't... so you can say, start flow...

so when you're selecting this one, it's not going to jump around these other frames... it's just going to start at that one... which makes it easy, when you want to restart... which is the 'R' key, can you see down here? 'R' key, let's go... it's okay, it needs to rotate more, and scale more...

I bet you yours looks better, so find a different image... I'm going to try it back and fix mine, you wait there. Actually, one thing before I do that I want to just point out... that there is the option to use this back option you're like, "Oh, just do that"... it's not going to work, what we want to do at the moment, we'll do it later on... it's amazing for like advanced prototypes...

but for the moment all it does is goes back to the frame that it came from... so it's not going to go back to the loop, it's going to go back just to this one... so it's going to go along here, then back to that, and it's not that useful... when we learn sections in a little bit... we do some advanced prototyping, that's super awesome... don't use it for the moment though, just go back to this one here.

All right, carry on with the video... so I went back and kind of played with it... and I bet you you're going to do a better job, mine just looks like it's moving... so have a play around with it, you'll get it to feel like it's scaling, and stuff... that's kinda better, getting there, but anyway. All I did was, yeah, go back and scale, and change the rotation a little bit...

there's a lot of trial and error. I'm going to do one last thing together with this... let's blur it... so what we're going to do is grab all of the Welcome screens... you, you, and I'm going to go 'Shift E', go back to Design... and let's add an effect to them all, not Drop Shadow...

'Layer Blur', grab this option and crank it up to-- I'm just going to drag it... and, there we go... and let's see if it makes it any better... 'Command Option Enter', 'Ctrl Alt Enter' to preview... after restarting, I'm not sure why that is happening, oh, so much better... here we go.

Can't wait to see what you're going to do, we'll do a class project next... and I'll get you to make one, or at least present your one... so I can see somebody's better one than mine... all right, I'll see you in the next video.
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