Hi everyone. In this video we're gonna look at how to uh, spec out a component. Okay? Document the different elements that make it up, color, font sizes, also the layout and spacing and padding. Great for sharing updates with the rest of the design team or specing out a document for developers. Awesome thing about it is most of the work is done by a plugin.
Super awesome plugin. We'll look at one that is quite detailed, one that gives us a bit more simple document measurements. Figma has an inspect option so people can go through and check it, but often working with larger teams, we need to do documentation as well. Alright, let's jump in. Alright, to get started, I've created a new page called Design Spec and it is empty. Uh, let's go optional alt two and I'm gonna type in card and I'm gonna find this that we made so long ago.
Do you remember this guy? Okay, you need to have something selected. It could be anything. Okay? And then you need to find the plugin. It's called eight Shapes.
The search feature In the plugins at the moment, you can't have eight space shapes. It just doesn't find it. So put in eight shapes together. There are other spec options, but this one here for me at the moment is awesome. Can't believe how good it is. So have something selected first, then click run and kick back and relax and be amazed at what it makes.
If nothing else, it's a great place to get started. There's probably more detail than we need. It might freak out whoever's looking at this to think that the heart icon down here depends on icon slash heart. You might have to reword that to make it clearer, but man, it's a great place to start. The anatomy here and down here. All the layout and spacings.
Again, there's heaps of detail in here. More than we need, which is good. Okay, padding is helpful, but do we need direction? Vertical? Okay, it's the way that the auto layer stacked it, eh? It's up to you.
Also brings out all my poor naming. Okay, so frame four is obviously not very good. Okay? So we need to go back and do some renaming before we run this, but such an amazing place and such a well designed plugin. One thing you might find is that if there's nested, like this one here was quite a complex nesting earlier in the course. So it has not defined early bird.
Okay? And number seven, price large. It hasn't been able to dig into the instance that is that lower card and the early bird. Okay? You can see here it's not documented at all. So sometimes, depending on the structure of it, let's make another version of it and you might have to break it apart a bit.
Okay? So I'm gonna use my command option B or control alt B to break it apart. Let's go to option one and have a look in our layers. So there's my vent card here on off. You can see there, there's nested uh, instances in here. So the heart icon's, not a big drummer, it's this one here.
Okay? That has got stuff inside of it. So I'm gonna break that apart. I'm gonna go inside the price, break that apart and it should see all of this. Now do I need to break that apart? Eh, why not?
Okay. Kind of trashed it, but at least now for documentation purposes, okay? Running this suite app. Okay, let's have a look. All right, let's have a look. Did it get into it?
It's a lot longer. Okay. And yeah, it's broken these parts down. It's handy for me as well. 'cause sometimes you're like, Hmm, did I really mean for that to be five pixels? You see at the top there?
Nope. 10 at the bottom. It's not what I wanted. Okay? And I can go through and make adjustments before I kind of send this out for development and add this to the documentation. Another handy one is, this one here does some really cool stuff.
It's quite long-winded though. And detailed, which is awesome. Uh, sometimes though. Let's grab this, make another version of it. And there's another doc. We looked at this earlier on.
It's called Design Doc. There it is. Okay. Design doc runs a similar sort of thing, but it's kind of more for look measurements. Okay? It's done.
The height and the width and you can click on stuff, the stuff that's important to you, okay? And then measure mode again. And it's gone through and added the padding. Okay? And it's a little, I guess just a different way of documenting it. Okay?
Same thing here. I love it. One thing you'll notice is that in your layers panel, can you see how massive it is now? Okay. These plugins are creating a lot of detail, especially that first one. Okay?
So keep it on its own page. And with this design doc, there's a lot of lock stuff. 'cause there's things like, I don't need this side of the width again, it's already in there. So I'm gonna select all of this. Anybody remember what the shortcut is? Uh, for unlocking command shift L, you guess, right?
Control shift L. It's only done it to the container. Let's do it to all Turner ones as well. Okay, now I can say actually this shift. Enter parent shift, enter parent, give rid all that. Any other double ups?
Nope, that is it. You might use this as either in addition to this other plugin. It really depends on what the requirements are for you and your company. One-to-one with a developer. Something like this might be enough. Chat with them, see what they want.
But if you're building a kind of online documentation, okay, a design system for lots of people to use in a big organization, something like this is a lot handier where you can add a lot more text and explanation, making sure people use your components, right? Alright, that's it. That's a great way to start documenting your components using a sweet plugin in Figma.