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!

How to apply component properties to existing design systems

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Course contents

Questions

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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

Hey everyone, hey, we've got an existing design button system here... it was built at a time before Figma had component properties... and there'll be lots of times, either with your own existing work... or documents from the community... where you want to go through and say... actually, I want to combine it down and use component properties...

it's going to allow us to do something like this... where instead of these many buttons all we need is these many... which is handy, both us, for organizing... and for the people using our buttons in the team... but really the video is, I want to show you the kind of shortcuts... to be able to make these updates in bulk, quickly...

whereas up until now we've been building them as we go... kind of working on individual parts... so bulk changes, bulk updating, and a good example... of updating previous files... to kind of a newer fancier format, all right, let's jump in. What we'll do is we'll work on this one together, from the Community...

if you do a search in the Figma Community for material design button... probably add the word "Merve" and you'll get here... thanks, Merve, and open it in Figma... if you can't find it I'll leave a link in the bottom of the class projects... there is a link there to it, directly... open up a version for yourself, and we'll see how much we can cut down...

plus we'll show you some of the shortcuts to make this easier and less painful. So let's go to the Button Variants page... and what we're going to do is try and... like we could work on this whole thing, but we'd be at this for a while... it takes a little bit of time to kind of reconfigure an existing design system... so what we're going to do is just tackle this bit...

and I'll show you some of the shortcuts... if you're having to tackle it yourself. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just quite big... I picked this one because it has left and right icons... which is going to make a good example... and what I'm going to do is...

because this is an existing design system that other people might be using... I might just leave this alone... and make another version. So I'm holding down the 'Option' key, 'Alt' on a PC... to leave this alone, it might be in a shared library... I don't want to mess with it...

what I'm going to do is, hopefully cut down... this lot, actually, we'll put them over here... so we can be all amazed at how much we saved... so we shouldn't need these ones, right? I need just one version, and what I probably need to do is... add both arrows in, so I can easily have...

none, right arrow and left arrow, by using our Boolean toggle. So these are all instances at the moment... I'm going to break them apart using 'Command Option B', or 'Ctrl Alt B'... now they're just auto layouts, let's turn them into a component... don't open... does everybody do that, 'Command Shift K' is, bring an image...

what I want, 'Command Option K'... and that's not even what I want either... I want to say, all of you guys, I want to make you into a component set... we could make multiple components and then combine them as a variable... which makes a component set, up to you... I'm just going to go undo and go straight to my component set...

with a bunch of variables in it. Let's have a look, so what I want to do is... it's a little bit of copy and pasting, let me show you some shortcuts... because I need this, right-- left arrow... to be in with this one, so I'm going to hit 'Enter'... to dive inside of the parent, and hit 'Paste'...

and then I can use my left arrow to kind of toggle amongst the siblings... now I want it for all of them, what I'm probably going to do is go--  if you click off, I'm going to click once, hit 'Enter'... and that selects all the siblings, I'm going to copy it, same for this... 'Enter' on my keyboard, select the siblings, delete it... click it again, hit 'Paste'... and I'm going to do that for all of these...

I'm going to do it in speed mode, you wait there. I feel like there was a faster way of doing that... let me know in the comments if you're like, "Hey, why don't you just do it this way?"  everyone else, have a look down there to see... if there was a better way of mass producing that. So we've thrown everything in there... now what we want to do is add all of our various component properties...

and what we're going to do now is not do them individually... we've been going inside and finding this, and going... finding the layer and saying... on the layer I'm going to have a Boolean, where I say On and Off... what we can do is actually grab the component set and just do it to this... we're going to add everything in one big go, and then go through and add it.

So what do we need? We need a couple of things... we need some properties here, now when you've got the whole thing selected... you've got just this one Properties option... Layer doesn't have it specifically, so what we can do is, we can say... let's have a Boolean...

this one's going to be called "Icon Left"... I'm going to have another one... it's going to be "Icon Right"... because that's something I want to turn on and off for them... I probably want to do something with the text to say... text is going to be "Button Text"...

apply that, don't hit Enter... Create Property, other things I want, I'm going to need... I've already got one property here, let's edit this and say... this is going to be my "State"... and I want another one that's going to be a variant... remember, before, we worked out we can't do size and color...

so we're going to-- oh, don't hit that one... we're going to do a variant that is to do with the size. So let's go and apply it now... so I've got this, let's click on this one here, use our sweet target... and say, I would like to apply the instant swap... I don't have another instance...

we could add that, but at the moment, in this document here... there's actually only two... and I don't need to swap this out, I just need to turn it on and off... so not this one, I'm going to find the layer, and say  I want the Boolean of Icon Left, to turn on and off... can you see that, you kind of added it to the component set... and now we can go through, and easily and quickly, say...

actually, I want the one that says Right, rather than creating it as we go... text again, click on this... I want the text to have, under 'Content'... and because we've already made it, when we click on it... it doesn't make a new one, it says, "Oh look, there's already one"... you can make a new one but there's that one.

Size wise, it's these ones here... actually, state wise is going to be Default, that's what I want... this one here is going to have a new value of "Hover"... this one here is going to have a new value of... "On Click"... when you click, kind of goes dark, and there'll be a Disabled or Inactive...

so let's add another State, and this one's going to be "Inactive". Next one we want is Size, so we're going to say, all of you fellas are size of... Default, no, you're going to be "Large", or just "L" even... you are all going to be a size of... you get the idea now, I'll speed this bit up. 'Shift I', I've got my button, I'm going to drag it out...

and hopefully now, I've got the different states... I've got the different sizes which I need to play around with Layer order here... but I've got Icon Left and Icon Right... and I can change the "Button Text". So we've gone from this chunk here to just this one here... which is really nice and tidier...

and it's a nice way to tidy up previous... existing design systems that you either get from somebody else on the Community... somebody else in your team, and one of the biggest things we can do is... we can do a lot of things in bulk by just applying them to the component set... and then using lots of our kind of nice shortcuts where we can... use this little Target to select them all and apply them all in bulk...

ideally, you'll add component properties as you're making them... but there's going to be lots of legacy stuff around... that were just built before this wasn't a feature in Figma. So there you go, updating an existing design system... and adding your component properties on top of them... all right, that is it, I will see you in the next video.
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