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 Variable Type in UX app design 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

Variable fonts are amazing, that's what we're going to do in this video... I'll explain what they are for the people that don't know what they do... and then we'll explain kind of the reasons why they're getting...|  more and more popular in UI design... both because of their flexibility and because of things like...|  file sizes, and how they could be implemented in CSS... then I go on a big tangent about independent foundries... and why you should use them...

so yeah, that's towards the end... all right, that is it, let's get into variable fonts... because they are amazing. So some of you know variable fonts, you might be using them... I just want to kind of point them out... and point them out why they're so useful and becoming more and more popular...

in kind of app design and web design. First up, what is a variable font? This font that I've been using... I pick Leto, it is not a variable font, how do I know? If I click on the little type settings here... there's no extra tab that says Variable...

I have a really great amount of different weights... and different italicies, different slants on it, so it's a really good font... it's going to do me well... but if I get the chance... I'm very excited when I pick a font that I like, that's also variable... what does it look like?

So this is Inter, the default, this one is variable... what it means is, I have best of both worlds... I have an option to actually just go straight old to Bold... for this first sentence here, but let's say for the title I want... maybe Bold, but actually, can you see... there's all this little adjustments in between...

can you see, when I drag this, can you see the title, look how much control I have... there's just so many fonts, we're like, Bold is not quite Bold enough... and Black ends up being like too much of, you know, too heavy... so you want to go back to like, "Oh, there's a little bit in the middle"... and why is this useful? It allows me a lot of control...

for the OCD designer in me... but also, when it comes to implementation on the code side... for either the app or the website... variable fonts are bigger, naturally... let me show you a font that I was messing with today... this font here Jog Clarendon...

what ends up happening is, there's two versions of this font... there's this version, which is your normal, where is it? This one here, Leto... jumping between all of these, there's just a bunch of different options... that's all of these... you install them all, and if you use them all...

the person building your app or your website...|  has to call all of these fonts to make it work... whereas this is bigger, you can kind of see it here... you see the Kilobytes is much bigger as this variable font... but it has all of this baked in, and all the bits in between... and it's really common when you are doing say a body copy font... to have at least four of these, anyway...

so you end up making up the size of that, you know... variable fonts are bigger for sure... but when you need four different weights anyway... you end up getting up to that size... and actually going way past it often. So variable fonts keep the file size down and gives you loads of extra control...

for those kind of edge cases we actually just need it to be... maybe the accessibility is wrong for this particular card... where you need to just bump it up a little bit more |... so that it's more visible against the background... is it required? No, it's nice to have, but it's always something I'm looking for...

and the other thing I want to point out while we're here is that...|  we've been using Google Fonts up until now... that's what's baked into Figma... but there are also loads of other ones around the world... from independent typographers, and I just want to point out... like I'm pointing out David Jonathan Ross for this one... just because I stumbled across one of his awesome fonts, this one here...

there's a free trial, and yes, you have to pay for it... if it needs to go into production, or use it for clients... but I think, as UX designers we're getting, I don't know... we're getting too Open Sans, Roboto-nist... where there's no love in the fonts anymore. So you can find great fonts, and also there is great variable fonts...

like this one here that I've downloaded, it's great and variable... and just look at how much we have on this one, so this one's Cabin... this one's from Google, so it will be in your drop down list... I'm going to switch to my new one... I can't give you the font because it's kind of--  you can get a free trial of this font, look how cool it is... you can go to his website here, djr.com, there's a free trial to go...

otherwise experiment with a Google font... and at the moment as well you can't really find out what is variable... I'm hoping that Font Preview plugin has it as an option... but also, you can go back to Google Fonts and do what I did, and just say... show me something that is, you know, only variable fonts... and you can kind of see if it has two axis or one axis...

what is two axis? Let me undo that... so Cabin is a good example of this, let's go in... so under Variable, can you see this, Weight and Width... I love it when there's width, especially for apps... the screen real estate is really small, you have to squeeze in some stuff...

so we've got Techno On The Bike for the name of this kind of event... but if there's something longer, I'm kind of stuck... breaking into two lines, having a word count on that... watch this, I can grab this, I'm not sure if I've got enough room... but can you see, I can use something, still not enough room... but it gives me ability to kind of fit more type in the top here...

they're all different, some widths go really, really low... and I love that ability to keep the same theme of font... same style, but be able to decrease or increase the width... and then this one here, it has weights as well, this one goes down to 400... and up to 700 only, but look at that. So I'm going to go back to my Job one, and just show you...

Techno On a Bike But, good work, Dan... let me just quickly make a couple of examples... look at that, look how much different though--  like how much communication you get with a variable font... like I can use the same font, keep the file sizes small... but do some very different things with my headings, cool, huh. Variable fonts are reasonably new...

so if you're working with a developer, you might have to just kind of say... "Hey, I'm using a variable font" ... so you're going to see all sorts of crazy sizes... normally they'd be expecting to see 700 or 300... but you've given them 763 because it's perfect for what you want to do... they might just dump it down to 700 because they're like, "How do I get 763?"  It's not hard, it's just a CSS class, easy to understand...

but you might have to remind them... or just at least point them in the right direction. All right, that's it, the other researchers go and YouTube, techno on a bike... or drum and bass on a bike, I love that guy... he cycles around, plays music, a bunch of people follow him, it's good fun... anyway, variable fonts, variable fonts are awesome...

if you didn't know about them, you're welcome, if you did know about them... hopefully they give you a little bit of information... so that you can sell it into the project... maybe look at paying for a font from an independent font source. Speaking of independent typographers... I'll give you the ones that I know, love, use...

and you can let me know in the comments the ones you do... so we can kind of get a little pull going. So David Jonathan Ross, somebody only just discovered recently... I'll leave all the links to this at the bottom of the exercise file... Klim, a fellow Kiwi... a beautiful website, and beautiful fonts, and big in the scene...

so go check out Chris' website, it's called klim.co.nz... CJ as well, somebody I know... does really cool fonts, I love using his work... and Blaze Type as well... it's more of a collection of independence... yeah, really cool stuff...

there's loads out there, so maybe explore something outside of Google Fonts... for your next project, yeah... all right, that is it, I will see you in the next video... go variable fonts.
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