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!

Spring Animation: How to make custom Spring Animation in Figma

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Course contents

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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 this Custom Spring settings... we're going to look at the difference between stiffness, dampening, mass... there's kind of a relationship between them all, plus the time... what the heck is this? We'll cover it all in the video... but if you want the short version, the short version is this...

Spring, is how springy something is... basically, how back and forth it's going to go before it stops... and by back and forth I mean this, like the jiggling back and forth... add a stiffer Spring and the thing gets more bouncy... Dampening on the other hand is... basically how much kind of glue or resistance there is to that spring...

give it none... and just goes on forever, give it loads... basically goes nowhere... Mass, how heavy something is... that's very heavy, it feels heavy at least... give it even more mass, this thing is super heavy...

and it's fighting against the spring, it's going to take forever to stop... there we go, no mass... thing's light as a feather, on a super springy spring. with no dampening... all right, that's a short version, hang around and we'll dive in... and we'll set up this little button thing...

because this is kind of handy to know how to make... all right, let's do it. To get started I am going to... just use the page that we're using for our test spring animations... I've made a frame, I've drawn something that looks like a button... it is just a frame, I'm not going to make components for the moment...

because I don't want to mess up my Assets panel, because this is just a demo. So what I want to do is, set up the first one... let's get something from our Assets panel... so 'Option 2', 'Alt 2' on a PC... I'm going to use the hard icon... we're going to use that same overlay trick to pull it in...

so it needs to be a frame, 'Command Option G', or 'Ctrl Alt G' on a PC... 'Command R' to rename it, let's call this one "Heart"  and it's about what I'm going to do, so now, 'Shift E'... "All the shortcuts, Dan, you're overwhelming people"... you're allowed to just click on 'Prototype'... so what I want to do is I want this to go to that... I'd like it to go, On Click is good...

you might note that you might be On Tap, is it? On Tap... mine should be On Tap as well... basically it tries to guess whether you're on a mobile device or a desktop... and it changes the language which confuses everyone... but anyway, On Click or On Tap, doesn't matter...

and then I would like it to go to open an overlay... maybe your frame has to be off the page, I'm going to go to 'Heart'... I'll just get it to go into the center... I'm going to get it to close when I click anywhere around the button... just to stop the animation, so I can restart it. Let's get it to move in, from the right, it's good for me...

let's actually have the gentle preset as a good comparison... now what I want to do is I want another one of these... I'm holding my 'Option' key down on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC... and 'Shift' to kind of drag it down to give me another one... and what I want for this one is, I want it to... not be Gentle, let's go to 'Custom Spring'...

and let the first one be... let's play around with stiffness... basically, this is how many bounces it's going to do... so look at the line here for gentle, just kind of goes, and... this line here is where it's going from right to left... and it's only going to go a little bit past where it needs to go...

and come back a little bit... only a tiny bit because it's gentle... but if I grab the stiffness, and say, you're at 500, let's say... it's going to go, bringing it all the way past it... you can kind of see it up here, look, you can see there, bouncing past it. So what we'll do is, actually, let's do the first demo with a stiffness...

of what was the default, 100, right? Yeah, let's do 500... let's duplicate this one this way, and do the exact same thing... and change this one... from stiffness, 100, let's go to, I don't know... 1000, crazy amount, now let's demo it.

I'm not telling you the shortcut for preview anymore... and we're going to make sure to go to the right one, let's use this one... and what I want is the first one... I'm going to go to the 'Fit to Screen '... I want this first one, that's the kind of gentle preset... but our one will crank up the stiffness to, what was it, 500?

Look, it's how many times it kind of bounces back and forth... how kind of strong that spring is, let's go up to... can't remember how much it was... but can you see, lower, the higher it gets the more bounces it has to do. Now the interesting thing with stiffness is that time plays a big factor... so I'm going to go 'Command 2', 'Ctrl 2' on a PC to change the tabs...

and I'm going to say, I'm going to make a third one... I'm going to be annoyed that I didn't make them big enough to have a third one. So this one here, I'm going to duplicate... and I'm not going to change anything, except for... see down here, we're going to look at what happens when we do change the time... it's going to mess with all of this, let's just do it first...

so, you know it's 1000, 15, 1, you remember that... if I change it to 2 seconds, or 2000 milliseconds... you're like, "Why did this all change?," and this is where it gets confusing... I've undone that, so basically, what it's saying is... I'm going to go one, two, three, four, five, maybe a little sixth... 1 at 1000, that's the sixth kind of springs back and forth...

so it has to fit there in 0.8 seconds, cool... but if I change the time it wants to do those same six kind of back and forths... but it has to do it over a lot more time... so the stiffness of the spring has to lower... so it kind of does the same six of them, they're all in there still... one, two, three, four, five, six, but it has to take longer...

so the spring ain't that stiff if it has to take that long to do six of them... am I helping? Let's preview it, so let's go... we're comparing this one, which is like six back and forth springs... happening quite quickly... this one's still six back and forth springs...

but it has to take a long, long time... because we told it to... so the spring doesn't look very stiff, does it, there you go... let's do some other ones and see if we can kind of get it better. So let's duplicate the Gentle again... and I'm going to change the color, wait for the jump cut, there you go...

I didn't say it was going to be a good color, but a color change... we'll look at dampening... so what is dampening? If you know shock absorbers, it kind of slows down the spring... the way I describe it, and the way it occupying my head... is kind of like adding a bunch of glue or molasses to the animation...

to kind of slow it down, and stop it being so free moving... so let's do it, let's, 'Shift D'... click on this one, everything is back to being gentle... let's switch it to 'Custom Spring', there's the default... dampening at 1 versus damp-- oh... dampening being at...

let's have a look at this one, let's go dampening at... 50... you can see, it really changes the graph there... but let's have a look at the animation... so you go away, click on this one... can you see, no dampening, no glue, no molasses...

no shock absorb-ering of the spring, springs is left to go crazy... so it changes the stiffness... don't think stiffness, think how many times it bounces back and forth... because it's left to a lot of no dampening it just goes forever, this one here... the stiffness again, just gets no bounce... so let's have a quick look at those two.

So this one here... because we changed the dampening, it's still the same stiffness... but it ended up cranking up the time... there's loads of time to get lots of back and forths in, let's look at this one... you can see, same stiffness but it changed the time on us... it's kind of backwards in terms of looking at the numbers...

but it makes sense when you're actually doing it... if you wanted to have more dampening, it's going to slow it down... so it doesn't need much time to go back and forth. So spring, how many times I want to go back and forth, dampening, kind of... gluey molasses honey stuff to kind of dampen down the spring... let me duplicate and change the color of this one, let's look at mass...

I'm going for the 90s hyper color sweaters, did anybody get that? If you're born in the 80s you might know, anyway. So what I want to do is look at-- so this one's gentle... so let's change it from Gentle and go to 'Custom Spring'... so mass, how heavy something is... so these are the defaults let's crank up the mass to 10...

same stiffness, same dampening, but the time got really long... let's do one more... and do this, the mass, how heavy something is... up to 500... look at that it's going to take - "More Maths, Dan." - 80 seconds... a minute and 20 seconds, "Good work, Dan." Let's preview them...

get rid of that guy, you come back in... look, he's super duper heavy... oh, this one, extremely heavy, you ready? Extremely heavy... but he has to do all his back and forths... because we said the stiffness, you know...

the, how many times back and forth that has to do... so it's going to be there for a while... do you want to watch it with me? You don't, oh... let's do one more, and let's... do the exact same thing, so let's...

have the mass low, have the dampening low, and the time... or the stiffness up to 200... let's make it a long time, I'm not sure how long this can go, is that maxed out? what's that, 2 seconds? Go a minute, 20, I said a minute, 20? Nope, only goes up to 10,000, so 10 seconds...

so let's have a go, and go, oh, disappeared... 'R' on your keyboard, just to reset it... here we go, there you go. I can't remember what we did... we turn the dampening down and we turn the mass down... and we turn the spring rate up...

and you can still see, it still jiggling in there, takes forever... it's got no weight, you can feel it, right? Now you can use these dragging slider things here, so let's look at this... we've been using just this part here... these things, I'm typing them in... you can't drag these, you can drag this one...

but you can actually drag this... so let's go back to 'Gentle'... and then go back to 'Custom Spring', scroll down... what you can do is, see this ball here, I don't really understand it... you can drag it around, and it does stiffness and dampening... you might be an animator, and be like...

"You know, there's this linear graph thing that we use all the time"... I find it quite tricky to use, but you can drag it. So dampening is up and down, and stiffness is left and right... you can drag this end part as well, and it affects both of them... because this kind of stays under this curve here... by dragging this end one, I mean you're dragging the time...

so it's kind of changing these to fit the parameters within there, there you go... I don't find that really useful. Oh, this one's going to be good though, you ready? Preview time... go away, come back... oh, that is good, maybe just drag it around...

"Don't be so number-ey, Dan."  I hope that was helpful, learning the kind of spring settings in there... Ease In and Out's great, nice and subtle... but you can really communicate... animation through some of these spring settings... and you can be super custom with them now, thanks, Figma... oh, it's good, eh, accidental goodness...

all right, I'll see you in the next video. Oh, one last thing before we go... they went - the update that I had just a minute ago... or earlier today - went and reset my-- why was he zooming in and out? Remember, I hold 'Command' and use my scroll wheel on a Mac... and it's 'Ctrl' on a PC, to kind of zoom in and out, use it all the time...

but it was working backwards, I'm like "Man, is my brain switched?"  Actually, that update went and, went to Preferences and inverted it... so that tick was, I normally have it on, to invert it... but by default it's off... so when the preferences updated they switched it on me... there you go, that happens, a little FYI for you at the end... all right, now on to the next video.
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