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!

Light and Dark Modes using Collections & Color Variables 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 are going  to look at light mode and dark mode. Okay? It means that we can select a frame  and say, you my friend, are now the color of light mode. Nope, you're dark mode and it goes  and changes everything inside the frame. To do it.

We need to learn what a collection is  and what a mode is. They're not particularly hard. So let's jump in and make this awesomeness happen. I love it. Oh, dark mode. Light mode, dark mode.

Light mode. Okay, to get this started,  I have got just a couple of bits of text. There's nothing going on in an image, okay? Uh, the first thing I want to do is have nothing selected. Let's go to our local variables, okay? And we are going to realize  that we have already got our first collection.

So we're talking about collections and modes, right? Collection. Just think of as, as a group  of different rules at the moment,  we've got this one called collection one. Okay? I'm gonna rename it and just call general, okay? Uh, my junk drawer of stuff I want, okay?

But there's more specific, um, collection  that I want to do with colors. We'll do another one for sizes in a bit. Those are all different collections. So I'm gonna say let's create a new collection. It's called this one. Uh, colors  American New Zealand.

Okay? So we put use in everything, um,  and we're gonna create a variable, okay? And we're gonna start with this color variable. Okay? So just to reiterate, we've got collections,  we've now got two, a general one that was doing our totals  and our cart switching. And now we've got color and you'll end up  with a few different collections.

Okay? So I'm gonna go to this one. Uh, we're gonna name this first color, okay? And we, when you're naming these,  if you're gonna use variables to change colors  and it's kind of like styles,  they do a lot of the same thing. Um, you can use the same naming convention. So this one's gonna be my primary, uh, primary color,  but we'll do text primary, okay?

So this is my primary text color. What color is it gonna be? I am going to use a dark color. I've kept this green so we can see it change. So I'm gonna use, ah, dark gray. Okay?

So that's gonna be my value for primary text. Now we've done collections, we know  what variables are, but what's this button? Okay, because wait, I keep clicking it by accident. Lemme get this extra category. These are the modes. So mode one, mode two, okay,  this one here is gonna be my light mode, okay?

And you can't tab across yet,  but this one here is going to be dark mode. Oh, it's getting exciting. Okay, so here I'm gonna say  where my text, I'm just using this one  definition text, okay? And I'm gonna apply it to this text here. But there's two different modes that I can switch between. Okay?

So I'm gonna have light mode and dark mode. Light mode is just gonna be light text E, okay? And that's the first part. So collections, different modes. Modes can be lots of different options. It could be small and medium sizings, okay?

In terms of maybe spacing and padding. Okay? So let's close that down. And what I wanna do is first apply it. So I'm gonna say you have got the fill color of,  I'm gonna go to my styles panel  and it's kind of, you know, bumped into all the SI styles. They haven't really separated it nicely yet.

And this might look different on yours, but there we go. Text primary boom, you text primary as well. So you're adding it to the things you want to be able  to switch between modes. Then how do you switch it? Okay? So it's applied, but it's in light mode, right?

So that darker color, how do we get it to go to  that white color dark mode you select on it,  go to the layers panel. So layers will have this little icon here, okay? We can change the variable mode  that only appears once you've got modes. Okay, there it is. There's color and ready set. Dark mode.

Exciting, eh, eh, make it more exciting Dan. Okay, so I'm gonna back out of that. What we can do is I'm gonna,  I should have made this before we started. Let me quickly turn this into an auto layout shift A,  then I'm gonna make another auto layout  that combines these two shift A. There we go. 'cause I want the  spacing and stuff to be played with.

All right, so we've got this, we could do it  to this whole parent frame and change it  and it would look through everything that has a mode applied  to it and try and change it from light mode to dark mode. So got the parent selected, okay? Which in my case is called frame two. It's gonna make it called card. And same place. Go to your layers panel.

There it is there. Okay? Color and everything inside of here should go dark mode. Look at that. Let's make it even better. Okay?

We want the background to change as well,  so we can actually read that text. So what we'll do is two things. Let's, uh, escape, escape, escape so  that we can see local variables. We've only got one color, color here. Let's add not another mode. That's what I want to click every time.

It's this one down here. Let's add another color variable. Okay? So we're getting there, right? We've learned color  number bullion. Okay, let's give this one a name.

So we're gonna do interface and uh, face. Sometimes it's called surface, okay? I'm calling mine interface primary. Okay? And I can use that once, but I've  got two different options for it. I'm going to pick, I don't know, dark purple  for my light mode.

Nope, that's for dark mode. Okay? So I'm gonna use just uh, off white. Okay? And this one's gonna be darker. There we go.

So two different options  that is nicely contrasted against that. And the text is nicely contrasted against  the interface background. So let's apply it. What do we apply it to? Let's do it to this auto layout frame. So you have a background fill of using the little symbols.

Um, picker. Okay, I'm gonna use interface. Great. Let's give it some 16 by 16 padding. Okay? And are you ready?

Okay, we can say you my friend are going to be layer panel. This whole thing inside of it is gonna be dark mode. Prepare yourselves. Ah, I'm excited. Are you excited? Doesn't me?

Ah, it's new stuff. I like it. Super awesome. Gets even better. Let's undo that. Okay, what happens is it defaults here?

Can you see it just defaults  to whatever the first mode is. So it's  Defaulted to light mode. Okay, whatever the first one was. Okay, so it's actually got a mode applied to it. Okay, so if I have two of these or three of these  and what if I could grab the whole frame  and just say layer is now dark mode,  way cool. A all right, so the things to remember is local variables.

I have got collections now. Okay, we've got more than one. We had collection that we're renamed general  and we've got this new one called color. We added a variant to it and we added an extra mode. So collections are just basically groups. Modes are things that we can change between,  we can give the object, like in this case a color,  one name, okay?

A token to say you are text primary,  but it has other functions that we can toggle between. From there you go and apply those colors to the things  that you want to apply it to. And then the parent frame, whether it's the text box, uh,  the auto layout that's just above it,  or the one that's surrounding it,  or in our case the whole phone, you can then go to layer  and then switch between the different modes. Alright, good work team. Let's do another version of that in the next video.
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