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 make a spillover mask outside of the frame in Figma

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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

Hi everyone, in this video we're going to look at something called Spillover Masks... it's a word that I made up... but it's these images... that kind of spill over the edges of the rectangles and circles... and it looks really cool, it's really easy, it's just an optical illusion in Figma... more of a layer stack, but it's cool...

so let's jump in, and I'll show you how they're made. All right, to get started bring in two images... I have got, there's two spillover ones, one with a mask, one without a mask... so for this to work you need to have masked something out from the background... but you need both of them to get that kind of cool overlapping thing... now, not a Photoshop course...

but I will at the end show you how I got this masked out... up to you, there's lots of other tools to do masking. What we're going to do is, we need these, I'm going to make duplicates of them... and I'm going to make sure this is over the top of this... because they're the same size, they should overlap nicely... it's a bit confusing, right, but you get the idea.

So what we're going to need, basically this one here, that has a mask... I'm going to turn the Eyeball off, I can't see it... this one here, I'm just going to move up so it's underneath this one... just for confusion sake... because I got these other copies up the top... so one on top, with the Eyeball off, so it's hidden, then this version...

what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool, which is the 'O' key... I'm going to hold down 'Option' on my Mac, 'Alt' on a PC, and 'Shift'... just so it starts from the center when I start dragging... and it's a perfect circle... get it how you want, the V tool, Selection tool, kind of line it up... and all we need to do is put this at the back...

so it needs to be behind this image, I'm going to 'Shift' click it... so I got both of these selected... make my mask, and then just turn the Eyeball back on this guy, on the top... look at that, there you go, inside-ey outside stuff... looks trick, but it's just a, I don't know, optical illusion. Another kind of interesting trick with this is--  I'm going to do the same thing, make a duplicate...

I'm going to hit the 'O' on my keyboard to get a circle... 'Option Shift', or 'Alt Shift' on a PC... and we'll do it with a color, like you saw at the beginning there, pick any color... as long as it's some kind of green... I'm looking, actually just, I was going to pick something different... but I want something that contrasts this kind of brown warm ochre color...

"and of course, it's green, Dan"... get it lined up, holding 'Shift', so it doesn't squish my circle... and I don't have to really do anything, just send it to the back... and this one up the top here... I'm going to add-- the cool thing about something that has transparency... if you add the effect of Drop Shadow in here...

I'm going to go '0', '4', it'll depend on your shape, looks fine for me, 0, 4... why 4? So it's poking down the bottom, and 25%, looks quite cool... so let's have a look, no shadow, shadow, no shadow, shadow, cool, huh. So really what happens is, the mask gets done somewhere else... and we just do some nice layering here in Figma...

now that's a super easy one, let's do one that's mildly more complicated. So let's bring in the other two images... remember, 'Command Shift K', 'Ctrl Shift K' on a PC... bring in the two 'Spill 02's, and I'm going to 'Place All'... and they just put them over the top of each other for me, which is great. So I've got one with a mask on top, and the no mask at the bottom...

what we want to do is, let's turn off the Mask one... let's just turn the eyeball off... who remembers what the shortcut is? 'Command Shift H', 'Ctrl Shift H' on a PC, so we've hidden that one... now this one here, so forget that one exists, let's just work on this... so I'm going to mask mine with a rectangle, actually, we'll use a frame...

because it might throw up another problem, that'll be helpful to cover... so I'm going to use a frame, same tricks work... if I hold 'Option Shift', and start in the middle... it'll draw a square from the center... and going to get it so that-- do I want our arms to pop out, "Yeah, let's do that"... wasn't my original plan...

and all we need to do is select both of these and make a mask... nope, that has to be the back... using my square brackets, then make a mask, all right. So let's hide that to try not be too confusing... and we've got Spill 02, let's turn that one back on... actually, let's turn that one on as well...

so I got my mask on, and then I've got this, this plain old Spill 02 mask... just hanging out here, we need to trim it up because I want the bottom to trim up... and what we could do to save time... is I just want to drag this up from the bottom, really, don't I? Who remembers what I hold down on my keyboard just to kind of trim it up? That's right, "Ccommand' on a Mac, 'Ctrl' on a PC, and there we go, cool huh...

it's kind of poking out the edges, nice and subtle, big one at the top... we can trim it up more nicely, I'm holding that same key down... so 'Command' on Mac, 'Ctrl' on PC... I don't know, I really like that kind of spillover effect. Now how do you get the mask, the next one I'll get started with the Pen tool... and we'll mask it out in Figma...

but at the moment there are some plugins, they're okay-ish, not really... and I'm not saying you have to learn Photoshop... but most people who do a lot of UX design work... will also know a bit of Photoshop and Illustrator... don't have to, those of you who do, I'll show you what I did... to get kind of the file started.

So this one was really easy... all I had to do was actually, delete the thing that I made... so open up the image in Photoshop, if you want to follow along you can do... I want The Spill 01 and O2, the No Mask options... so I'm going to drag that into Photoshop, open it up... and we'll start with this one, because this one was super easy...

I just went 'Select', 'Subject', which is magical and awesome... it's even done a pretty good job of... in here, around the glasses... it depends, like we could spend a long time doing masks... but for what we need, probably need to trim that out, maybe. So I'm going to grab my magic wand tool...

and we don't use the magic wand anymore, we use the Quick Selection tool... which is better... and I'm going to hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC... just to get rid of some of this... and let go of that key to add to it... you end up, hopefully, with something that's kind of a bit balanced...

and again decide on how much detail you want to go into... that feels like enough for me... and then I just say 'Add Mask'... and then I say 'Command Option Shift S'... to do this one here... it's under 'File', it is under 'Export', and it's this one here...

'Export As' is great... if you're still using Save for Web, don't... this one here is much better... PNG, some transparency... I gave mine a width, you know, a height of 1500, just so it's not so big... and that's how I mask this one.

This other one here was a bit trickier... so I went 'Select', 'Subject', stand back, and oh... got close, and it's the same key... we can play around... there's two things we need to do, back to the Quick Selection tool... and you just-- let's have a look.

Let's, holding nothing down, because there's missing bits, so I just... by default it's on the plus, adding mode, I just drag around... until it starts getting the bits I want... I'm being very lazy here, but it's doing a pretty good job... all of this, it's still a good image to mask, there's reasonable contrast... again, I'm not doing anything, I'm just kind of dragging it around...

now if I want to remove-- because at the moment that's selected, right... so if I do that, boom, bad... so what I want to do is minus this bit out. So like before, hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC... and just drag in there, just really wants to snap to the edges... and it learns as you go...

don't want this bit, so I'm going to 'Alt' drag... and I went, oh yeah, get all of this, and because it's a really similar tone... gets rid of that bit as well... so I'm going to add that back in by not holding anything down... and now, how long am I going to spend making this awesome? That'll be up to you...

you can just click once, went too far, 'Option' click this bit... you end up with this balance of like, yeah, it's really good, I love it. So that is my mask, and then I went... 'Save as PNG', bring into Figma, actually no, it's not... because I had a look at this, so if I do this mask... it's a little chewed up on the edges, right?

It's like... the edges are okay, but it's a little bit, I don't know, chewed up... what we can do is, once you've added your Layer mask... you can have the mask selected and go to this one that says... click on the 'Layer' mask, go to this one that says, 'Select a Mask'... this is the magic part of Photoshop, it'll stay nice and close...

watch this, if I crank out the radius, too far... it'll smooth out my edges, so I've got it up a few pixels... if you tap P it'll show original, toggle it back and forth... and it's kind of dove into all the weaves here, just looks a little bit nicer. There's a lot more to select a mask... what I might do is, look at smoothing, I'll crank it right up...

kind of smooth the edges, too far, but a little bit of smoothing... or just a couple... I feel like that's fine for what I need... there's any kind of ghosting around the outside... you can shift the edge in a little bit... let's shift it all the way in, can you see, it kind of...

all the way out, all the way in, kind of removes a bit of that ghosting... again a little bit, and just kind of repairs that mask or kind of like... I don't know, fancies it up a little bit. So now I'm going to click on the 'Layer', I'm going to 'Export as PNG'... and that's how I got those images for you, for this video... cross sale, do Dan's Photoshop Essentials or Advanced course...

depending on your level... I reckon everyone does the Essentials one... there's so much in there that you might have missed... even if you are reasonably experienced at Photoshop... if you've already done my course, high five, here you go, bam. All right, that is how to do spillover masks in Figma, there's just two layers.
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