hello, guess what we're going to do... oh, you guessed right, how to curve text in Figma... some people call it type on a path, wrapping text around a circle... I'll show you that Figma doesn't do it natively, but we can use a plugin... we'll look at the limitations of those plugins... and then show you how to do in Illustrator and bring it in...

all right, let's curve some text. First up you need some text, second of all you need a curve... I'm going to use the 'P' for the Pen tool, I'm going to click up and drag... and click up and drag to get kind of a curvy thing... and I'm going to hit 'Esc' a couple of times to get out of Drawing mode... then I'm going to combine them.

Now Figma itself doesn't do Type on a curve so you need to use a plugin... I'm going to use 'To Path', seems to be the most common one at the moment... the one I use has a few bugs, will it be around when you're looking at this? Who knows, check, see if it runs... maybe do a search for "type on a path or curved text in Figma"... and see which one pops up...

this one here at the moment works reasonably well... and I'll select both of these things, and I'm going to say... and there you go, curving text in Figma. Let's do the circular one, and we'll dive in a little bit more... and see where it breaks. I'm going to grab this one...

and that particular plugin doesn't work for going completely around... so we're going to use, there's this one called Arc... have a look for it in your plugins, again, this is not here... see if you can find where that is... you can't see the preview down here but you can see it up here... and you can see on how much you want to go around, very cool.

I'm going to go to 100%, so it's a perfect circle, and there you go... but there you go, that kind of overlapped, weirdly. So all of these plugins, this one and this one... I want to just point out that they bug filled, great they're around... and I get asked loads, you know, from people, how to do this... and you can make it work in Figma using those plugins...

those plugins will get better, eventually Figma would do it... but let's, see that one here, I don't know... the preview looked like it was butting up nicely at the bottom... but now it's overlapped... can you adjust it afterwards? You cannot...

but we could do it again because it makes a duplicate of it when it makes it. So some quirkiness, this one here has more quirkiness... the cool thing about this curve one though is that with it selected... I can open up my previous plugin... which is called Path, what was it called 'To Path'... let's run it, I can continue to adjust it, watch this...

but it ends up doing some funny stuff, you're like, "What's up with that?"... why the big leading there? Can you adjust leading on the fly? You cannot... you can do some crazy stuff with like... actually, before we leave here there's an offset from, you know, pixels...

so you can push it along and go back to '0'... you can line it at the right, you can line up the center... and the offset here, you can decide, it goes from 0, which is underneath... to, I'm going to use my up arrow, so 0.1, 0.2, 0.3... 0.5 is halfway through, and you can go all the way up to 1... if your curve is going this way you can play around with the Horizontal Align...

but let's say that is doing some weird stuff... I'm going to go back to my offset being 1... how do I fix that? You can do a workaround... I know I'm going to get frustrated with this workaround... and then just jump onto Illustrator, show you how I do it...

because this is pulling from this, and they're linked. So I'm going to go in here and go use my sweet shortcut... remember, cursor flashing between anything, and go... actually, I'm going to select all of these, maybe just those... and I'm going to hold down the 'Option' key on my Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC... and I'm going to use the '>' and '<' symbols to kind of open it out...

and you're like, "That's not enough."  It doesn't dynamically update, but I can now open that plugin, 'Command Option P'... have this selected, and can you see, it kind of rejigged it when it looked... so I got the F and the I kinda working, and you can spend your time now... going back and saying, actually, you're bigger... you need more, and you need less... you need less, and it's been drafting and doing that...

how'd that go? That's better-ish... and what I'd end up doing, is getting frustrated... and just jumping out to Adobe Illustrator... which I know not everyone has, I'll delete my text in there... actually, I'm going to copy that...

Illustrator is just more mature product for doing this kind of stuff... and jumping back into Figma, so again, I'm going to use my 'Pen' tool... click and drag up to get the same kind of curve... 'Shift X' to change the Fill to the 'Stroke'... I'm going to use the 'T' for the Type tool, and watch this... if I just hover above it, it does the nice text on a path, here we go...

I'm going to paste that. We did kind of using Illustrator with Figma in the Essentials course... but one thing you might find is, if I copy this... because it's in such a strange thing, that Figma does not recognize... when I paste it, just comes in a little pixelated, which is not good... what I want to do is make a duplicate, I want to outline it...

I'm using old shortcuts here... 'Command Shift O', 'Ctrl Shift O' to outline it. Now I can copy it... it's not editable now in Figma, but at least it's vector... and nice, and scalable, and good... and just the way that it deals with type, is a lot more...

a lot more better than having to try and do that to make that happen... and then go back to that. Same thing with a circle, I'd probably just jump out to Illustrator... grab my 'Ellipse' tool, hold 'Shift', drag out a circle... grab my 'Pen' tool, and click on, not on that, because it'll go inside... I want to find that 'Type on a Path Tool'...

sometimes it defaults to it, sometimes it doesn't... I'm going to start mine about there, and there you go. It's pretty good, by default, there is a lot more options... under Object, Path, nope, 'Type'... 'Type in a Path', and you can go into 'Type in a Path Options'... and there is...|  a lot more you can do in here, make sure preview's on...

and again, outline it and bring it into Figma. So yes, plugins are good...|  at getting Figma to kind of push the limits of what it does... and they will get better, and Figma will introduce some of the stuff itself... sometimes it's just easier to go out to Illustrator... but I know, not everyone has Illustrator, the program, or the skills in Illustrator.. but I find, as a UX designer, I jump up to Illustrator a bit...

for doing kind of, especially illustration, drawing, type on a path... so it might be the next course, after this one... I've got a course for Illustrator... there's an Essentials and an Advanced, if you do want to go there... you'll find it the same place you've got this... just look for Illustrator Essentials or Illustrator Advanced, cross sell done...

all right, that is it, I will see you in the next video.