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 use Sections in Figma for organizing your content

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents

Questions

1
7

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.

How to earn your certificate

Work your way towards your certificate for this course by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz (Merit level courses only)
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project (Distinction level courses only) - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Request your certificate when you've completed the requirements for the certificate level you're working towards

Good luck!

Pass certificates

We’re awarding ‘Pass’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Pass’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when all your projects are complete

Good luck!

Merit certificates

We’re awarding ‘Merit’ level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your ‘Merit’ certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Don’t forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Distinction certificates

We're awarding 'Distinction' level certificates for this course.

You can work your way towards your 'Distinction' certificate by following these simple steps.

  • Watch the course videos
  • Complete the Class Projects - look out for the videos marked with
  • Upload your class projects into the My Projects area in your account
  • Complete and pass the Knowledge Quiz
  • Complete the Distinction Certificate Project - look out for the video marked with
  • Upload your Distinction project to the My Projects area in your account
  • Don't forget to request your certificate when you have passed the quiz and completed all your projects

Good luck!

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

All right, hands up who's never used this option here, called Section... if you got your hands up, we're going to look at it in this video... for using sections, for organizing your content... kind of like this, where we can section off mobile, desktop, tablet... we'll double back and change our kind of like component area for a section... why are we doing sections for organization here...

in our prototyping section of the course? Because in the next video we're actually going to use sections... to do do some pretty sweet prototyping... but I bet you, lots of you don't know the... like main purpose of section... so let's do that here, they're kind of awesome, okay, mildly awesome...

but we need to learn them so that we can use them in the next video... all right, let's jump in. All right, first up I've borrowed a file from the Figma community... thank you, Honza Uchytll. So I've borrowed it just so that I found something... that had mobile, and desktop, and iPad, different screens in it...

so this is a really good example of organizing using sections... sections are hiding under where we have frame... there's one called 'Section', we have to click on it... and we can just draw a box around stuff we want to organize... there you go, let's have a look at our layers... everything is inside Section 1, let's 'Command R' to rename it...

let's call this one "Mobile"... now could we not just do this with a frame? Hit the 'F' key for frame, drag it around this slot... and same thing, I'm going to name it, I'm going to call it "Desktop"... no, there's not a lot of difference between the two... except, there's just visual differences when it comes to organization...

in the next video when we start doing some cool prototyping it's magic... but for now, can you see the differences here... it's a, I don't know, is a little bit more different from all the other frames... it's got a little box around it... we can, like frames go, you, we're going to pick a background color... to help separate it out from the background...

same thing, we can do with a frame. One of the sweet things you can do with it... is double click the edge and it kind of wraps it around, leaving some padding... can you see, it leaves like a 100 pixel padding either side... and it's just a visual difference of kind of like... a hierarchy when you're trying to like separate things out...

trying to show developers or other people, or keep your ideas in some sort of check. Other things you can do with it... is you can click on the 'Section', and when you go to 'Share'... I'm going to share a 'View Link', can you see, it says, Link to Current Section... you can turn that on if you've got it selected... let's copy the link, and I'll open it up...

so when I send it to someone else, they open it up... and they get directed to this particular section... now frames to do that too. We're back, there's Anonymous, I opened it up in a private browser... and Anonymous has joined me... so let's wrap up the organizational parts for it...

so shortcut is 'Shift S', you can drag them out... you can convert things into sections... so this frame here now, maybe you have got something already... it's already sectioned out... you can right click it and say, 'Convert to Section'... you can grab a bunch of stuff and go, you, right click, and say...

'Wrap a New Section'... 'Command R', and this is going to be "Tablet"... because we're here, and because we're advanced - I'm going to undo that  - you can convert back... let's say that this one was a frame to start with... you can convert it to a section up here and toggle between them, there we go... it's easy to add stuff too...

you might decide that this particular screen needs to be in here... and it just jumps sections, like frames do. You can get rid of a section by right clicking it, and saying... 'Ungroup', weirdly, there you go... not unsectioned... you can't put sections inside of frames, interestingly.

So let's convert this to, back to a 'Frame'... and I want to say, inside of here I want a big frame, I'm going to say... 'Shift S' for sections, I want this to be my specific section... and it kind of works, except, it doesn't... it looks like it's inside of it, but can you see... it jumped out of that frame called Desktop, and just went above it...

it always wants to be the parent, it's bossy that way... so it's used for like high level organization... not for sections inside of frames. Other thing to note... is you can have sections within sections though, sure thing... I got a section here, let's give it a background color...

I can put another section in here, and another section in there... you see, I can get this hierarchy going, but the section has to be the high level... and that's about it... for us, I command you to go to Tab 2... it's 'Command 2' on a Mac, 'Ctrl 2' on a PC... because I want to go to my second Tab...

and I'm going to go to this section... this is perfect to be a section... it gets the sweet icon, it gets a slightly different title... I can double click the outside to make it all fit nicely... and I might work my way around and have welcome screens... and my kind of, I don't know, my signup process is a separate section...

you get the idea. All right, so we're good with sections for organization... let's get into the next video, we'll do sections for prototyping... which is super more fun.
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