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!

What are Design Tokens 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.

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

Hey everyone. Uh, in this video we're going to discuss design tokens. Okay? There's a lot of talking in this video trying  to explain what they are when we use them,  the main reasons we use them, the difference  between variables, styles and design tokens. There is a lot of arm weaving that you can't see  and me explaining, but hopefully it's useful to get us kind  of ready for the next video  where we actually start doing some of the design tokens. But let's get started.

Let's get the arms waving. Let's go. So let's start off by making a simple design token. Okay? At the moment I've got this just basic design here. I'm hard coding the color, okay?

So this color has a stroke down the bottom of this screen. This box at the top here has the same color. That's not good because I have to then go  and update all of those colors, uh,  every time I wanna make a change. So we need something to represent that color  and that's where a design token can be useful  and that's where a design token is useful. Be warned, we've kind of done this already,  so nothing selected. Let's go to local variables.

Let's create a variable, okay? A color variable. I'm gonna call mine color primary. I'm gonna give it this color. I'm gonna go and apply it. Okay?

So I'm gonna grab this box at the top here  and I'm gonna say, I don't want you to be hard coded. I'd like you to use one of the styles. It's kind of not a style. Styles are down here in  the circles, okay? And the variables mines are jumping around. Stop jumping there.

Is there in the square. Okay. Basically the same thing. Here we go. I've applied my color variable, AKA design token to this box  so that later on it's really easy to go  and update the color, especially when I've got  multiple instances of the same thing. I can say local styles.

You design token are this actually  because we've used a token instead of the actual number. It's really easy to go and update. You're like, Hey, is that it? There's more to it. But basically that's what it is. This here is a token K that represents this.

We use this instead of that number  as like a placeholder design token, variable placeholder. They all do the same thing. They represent something else that kind  of holding information inside of them. And in our case is holding color. We could create another design token. Okay?

This one could be a number and this one's going to be  Border radius and we're gonna use eight. That is another design token. Really simple one. We'll get more complex, but now you're asking a design  tokens, just variables. They totally are. If it's a variable  that controls the design of something like spacing  and padding and font  and color design, token, AKA, a variable,  what's not a design token, but still a variable.

Think things like there's  so many more variables in the world, okay? When it comes to especially coding, okay? Uh, we did this earlier in the course. Let's look at our local variables, okay? Where we went to general, okay? Total equals value zero.

That is not a design token. Is the cart full false? No. That's a bit of logic we used for uh,  creating our advanced prototype. It's a variable, but it's not a design token. Design tokens is a way of us as designers to kind  of like group the things that we spend all our time doing.

Okay? Font spacing, color kind of focuses  what we do with variables. But your developer will just call everything that you do. Doesn't matter if it's color or font,  probably just a variable and might shake their head at you  going fancy design tokens. It's just a variable. And you're like, yes it is.

But it defines our world. So we've made some design tokens earlier on. Uh, let's look at spacing still. The design token, okay, this represents eight pixels. So SM is our token. We use that instead of this to make it easy  to update both in our figma design  and in where our designs are being deployed, okay?

In a website, in an app so  that your developer is also using this variable name so  that things are consistent. So why do we use them? Kind of three reasons I think. Um, one is that it makes things a lot clearer if I'm using  Border radius, okay? In my both my design  and when I'm coding the website,  say you're building out CSS border Radius is so much easier  to understand and logical, it makes sense. Second reason is for large complex designs,  we need this kind of structure so  that we're not just using the color values  and pixel values on everything can get unwieldy real quick.

So great for large designs  and probably the most important is when you are working  closely with the development team. This is probably the most important reason  for using design tokens. 'cause what we can do is we can both agree both sides design  and development agree on a naming convention so  that they're not trying to translate  what you've called color one to  what they're calling color primary. If you also use color primary, ah,  we all know what we're talking about. There's gonna be a lot less, uh, implementation problems. And later on when you're trying to update the design,  you can say, Hey, color  primary needs to be this other color.

And your developer goes, no problem. I can update that 'cause it's written right here. Color primary. So why don't we just use styles like  we'd have in the rest of the course? Styles are fine. Okay?

They're very, uh, Figma centric though. There's nothing really wrong with them. The big upside of using say variables as design tokens. You can kind of use uh, styles as design tokens as long  as the naming conventions are fine, okay? 'cause you've seen we've made color primary before  and we've gone into color value,  the developer will know exactly what you mean. But when it comes to the term design tokens,  often we are referring to variables  and we like variables more than styles, mainly  because we can do two big things,  which we'll actually do in the next video.

A lot of talking in this video. I know we need  to set the ground, but I need to set the stage a little bit. So let's have a look at our  one we're making in the last video. What we can't do with styles is we can't do these modes. Okay? Compact, comfortable.

That's why design tokens AKA are better fitting  with variables, okay? 'cause we've got these different modes. Same with the colors that we made. Okay? We've got light mode and dark mode. Whereas in styles we'd have to go text primary light  and then have another listing that said, uh,  text primary dark.

Whereas this, we can just have one in these two  different variable modes. The other reason we use variables instead of styles is  that you can get variables to reference other variables. We'll do that in an example coming up,  but styles are kind of their own thing,  whereas variables can all link together  and get this kind of like chain action going. That's where the design systems can get quite tricky  and quite complex when variables reference other variables  who reference other variables. It's also their secret power though man. You've done some talking, Dan.

Have I clarified it at all? Probably not. Let's go and actually do something in the next  video and we will kind of make a little bit more sense. Hopefully you should see how much arm waving I'm doing. Can you feel arm waving to help explain it? Okay.

Uh, anyway, uh,  let's get onto the next video and actually do some stuff. Put it into practice.
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