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 curve text with type on a path in Figma

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents

Questions

3

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

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.
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