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!

Houdini Text: How to make a text mask animation Figma?

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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.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi everyone, we're going to make this, how cool is that! We're going to do Houdini text, it's going to appear out of nowhere... so we're going to to learn, we know masking already... what we're really doing is, A, it's a cool effect... but also it allows us to do timing, that is two different animations... see the background gradient moving...

and this animation happening at different timing... and on our page here, it is again, just nice and clean... there's my animation, my background, don't have a zillion, let's have a look... different frames, all connected up because I'm using variants... and because I'm using separate variants... it means they don't all have to happen at the same time...

whereas before, remember this... it's fun, but the animation is all timed at the same pace... because they're all heading to the next frame... whereas now, because they're separate variants... they can have their own pacing, and own timing, and own easing... I think I've explained it, over explained it?

I have, let's just do it... all right, let's jump in. First thing is, we need two separate text boxes, so I've gone for Viva La Techno... come up with your own catchy welcome screen... it might be, "This is Country", "Welcome to Classic Rock"... just make sure it's two separate text boxes...

because we want to animate them separately... do whatever you want with fonts and font weights... we just need two separate boxes. Next thing is, we need rectangles that we're going to... use as masks... so this is one of the few times I'm going to use...

the Rectangle tool, which is the R key... instead of the Frame tool, because, doesn't have to have all the special powers... it just needs to be a box over the top... cool shortcut here is 'Shift O'... Shift O is kind of handy on your keyboard... to show Outline mode, so you can actually see...

because we covered it up, it's hard to see, did we get it right? Covered it up... and what I might do is, with my V tool, for the Move... I might get it so it lines up relatively close to the bottom... going to make sure it covers it all. I'm going to grab the 'Rectangle' tool again and draw another one...

and just get it to snap to the bottom... there we go, 'Shift O' to come back. The other thing that needs to happen is that the text needs to be... on top of the rectangle for the mask to work... so I'm going to move it to the back and I'm going to use my shortcut... so down, next to your P key is the open and close square brackets...

if I hit the 'Open', goes all the way to the back of the Parent frame... which is called Welcome Alt 1... and unfortunately it's gone behind my Gradient mesh... can you see, it's disappeared, behind the cool background. So to make that tool a little bit easier have a look over here, watch this... if I use open, close, open, close, can you see...

Rectangle 18 goes all the way to the top, all the way to the bottom... which is often what I want to do but if you want to come up in little steps... hold the 'Command' key down on a Mac... 'Ctrl' key down on a PC, and that'll--  watch this, it'll jump up amongst his friends, can you see that... you can get it just behind the text... same with you, hold 'Command', or 'Ctrl' on a PC...

and use those square brackets to kind of get it to go where you need it to go. Let's make the masks now... so what I tend to do is, I could lock the background... I'm going to double click to grab the Gradient mesh... which I ended up diving too far into... I can lock it using my sweet shortcut that nobody remembers, 'Command Shift L'...

that means I can drag across and only get just these two bits... what I tend to do though is I leave the thing unlocked... what I do is, I go, all of you, so I've grabbed both the rectangle and the text... and the background, and I just hold 'Shift' and click... I do that all the way through the course... so I won't explain that anymore, but that's what I do...

you guys, 'Shift' click the background to deselect it... and I've got everything underneath, let's make a mask, boom. Do the same thing for this one... there's a shortcut, 'Command M', 'Option M'... all right, I'm back, you didn't know I went, but I had to stop recording... because, if you hit 'Command M', 'Option M it will minimize everything...

don't hit that key... that one is actually 'Command M', 'Ctrl M', it's a shortcut I never use... hover above it... it might be something you use enough to remember, I don't. One thing with me is, can you see, it's trimmed off the bottom of my text... so I'm going to grab my 'Rectangle', and just make it a bit deeper...

doesn't really matter how big it is... as long as it's kind of covering the bottom there... as long as it's showing all my text... because it's going to kind of jump up from the bottom... 'Shift 2'... so I've got my masks, hasn't really done a whole lot, right?

They've applied, '+', '+', '+'... but the text inside this mask group can now disappear that's what we want. So I need three variants, I'm going to animate between them... so this is where we're kind of at the same point for the background gradient... remember, we made it a component set with variants... and then animated between those.

So with it all selected I'm going to go 'Command Option K'... 'Ctrl Alt K' on a PC to make it a component... let's 'Command R', 'Ctrl R' on a PC to give it a name... "Welcome Page Animation"... and what we're going to do is have one variant, and another variant... I'm going to, I could do it on this page here...

what I might do is just grab the whole component set... go to 'Cut', go 'PgUp'... and paste it on this page, give it its own spot... 'Shift 2', and what I want do is, the first one... this first variant called Default... let's rename this one, let's call this one "Frame 1"...

'Shift Tab' goes up one, so we can rename this one as well... 'Command R', this one's going to be 'Frame 2'... 'Shift Tab', that is a random shortcut that I use a lot for renaming ... 'Command R', 'Ctrl R' on a PC... let's call this "Frame 3' just so it makes makes it clearer... and weirdly I need them to be in order because it makes more sense.

So Frame 1, I'm not going to see anything, so what I'm going to do is... I'm going to double click... until I get the text, and I'm going to hold 'Shift' and drag it down... or use my arrow keys on my keyboard, just to tap it down so I can't see it... the Techno in this one here is going to be the same, I'm going to drag it down... hold, if it jumps out of its little box...

how do we stop it getting out of its little box? We're going to say, drag down, hold 'space bar'... don't jump out, space bar to the rescue... so nothing, which one do I want to appear first? You, but not you... you're going to go down, don't do that...

make sure you got the text selected inside the frame... hold space bar so it doesn't jump out... so nothing, that appears, then disappears... do you get the idea, now we need to link them up, so 'Shift E'... and we say, you go to this, and we say... 'On Delay' of, let's just leave it as is, go to 'Frame 2'...

let's do 'Smart Animate', let's do 'Ease In and Out'... and back, let's do that. Same thing for this one, you go there... but for some reason it doesn't remember... it needs to go to After Delay again, everything else is good. Let's use 'PgDn'...

got nothing here now, so let's go to my Assets, 'Option 2'... and I want to drag this out... one of my problems is, the first frame is invisible... which makes it not a very good component over here... can't figure out a way at the moment to update the thumbnail here... you can do the thumbnail for the whole project...

but not for individual components... let me know if you've got a work around, or... if that's an update that's happened, let me know in the comments. So we've got our invisible box, let's test it, does it work? I don't know... click on it, 'Command Option Enter', 'Ctrl Alt Enter'...

hey, it's a little bit fast... hit 'R' key on your keyboard to reset it... I need some better timing but let's save that for the next video... I'll show you some of the new easing options in Figma, there's some cool ones... but there you go, that's how you mask text, and how we go from... the dreaded frame by frame, everything has to be the same...

to now, we've got something that... the background animation is going very slowly, and... our text animation's happening super fast, they don't all have to do the same thing  because we are professional Figma users... all right, I'll see you in the next video.
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