Hi everyone, let's talk just a tiny bit more about what spacing should be... I've given you some generic stuff in the last one... where did I get that magic from, how do you get better at it? If you are already quite proficient at your spacing, you can move on... but if you want a little bit of... I don't know, help to make sure things are consistent and easy...
to work with your developer, when you hand off your app, not causing problems... or at least being mindful of the developer... and what they're going to be working with, watch this video. So there are lots of places that your app or website are going to end up... and what will end up happening is, your engineer, your developer... whoever you're using to make it...
it might be you, it's highly likely to be built... on top of what's called a Framework... your developer, she's not going to be going through... and putting all the naughts and zeros... they're going to be building on top of things... that are built on top of things, that are built on top of things.
So if you're an iOS developer, the developer is going to be using... the pre-made, or at least, guidelines from Apple... if it's Android it's going to be, this Material... that's what they call their design system... and they give you lots of helpful things about how things should be spaced apart... if you're going to web it might be Bootstrap, it might be Tailwind...
so talk to the developer, figure out where it's going, what they're building it on... and then have a little read around, it can be confusing... but we need to get started in these sorts of things so that you can actually... I don't know, begin your understanding of... maybe a little bit of CSS, a little bit of code... so that you don't throw your developer a spacing of 7...
because 7 is tricky, because you can't divide it in half... you can't have half a pixel... you can divide 8 in half, you can have 4 pixels... let's have a little look at why 8 is good as well. So let's look at Material for Android, I'm in there, material.io... I'm on their version 3, in the future you might be at version 4 or 5, check it out...
I'm under 'Foundations', I'm looking at 'Layouts', 'Understanding Layout'... and it's just really nice to go through and say... space between columns is a default of 24 DP... which is essentially pixels... sure for device independent pixels... they use this because lots of different phones have different...
like pixel densities... just consider it pixels, if you understand that... and when you're designing in Figma, DP equals PX. So they're using spacing of 24... so make sure, when you're building out your little spacer block... and you're going to Android first, make your gap 24, that's the default...
it's happily divisible by 8, not by chance... or at least it's a really common spacing for the moment. Let's have a look at iOS... have a read through, what they do... I think they're using 20 for their margins on their sides... they have some different defaults to a lot of other ones...
and the thing with iOS is, there is... both, phone, there is TV, there is gadgets, there is watches... so have a little look, whatever you're designing for... there will be documentation online... if you're going out to web, so you're building a website, or web app, find out... is it WordPress, is WordPress using Bootstrap?
Bootstrap is a framework that helps developers work fast... and what they'll end up doing is, let's have a little look... I found this, the gutters is what they call it, the space between stuff... and the default gutters are 1.5 rem... and you can see there, they're set 24 pixels, the same as Material... so if I use 24 as my spacing...
the developer is going to like it because it's kind of consistent with Bootstrap... and it's consistent with Android, depending on where you're going. Now there are a hundred different frameworks... Tailwind, people are using this a lot to help with their styling... you can see in here, I found, under Gap, Bootstrap calls it Gutter... Tailwind calls it Gap...
it's all useful to know, as a UI designer, you can see here... what a developer will type in, is they won't actually type in the number... they'll just hopefully be close to one of these... so they'll put in spacing when they're coding, to say... Gap is 0, which is 0, Gap is 1, which is 0.25 of a rem... a rem by default is 16, so 0.25 of 16 is 4 pixels...
So remember that little spacing we had before, that's the minimum one here... it's a good rule to not go 3, you know, the divisions become tricky... and your developer is going to have to go and override... a lot of the framework defaults... you can do it, but your developer probably just ignore it... and use some of the defaults, unless you force them...
let's have a look, so 16, 6, 8, 10, oh, there's a 10... you might decide that in your design, that you need a 10... where was it, we don't have a 10, we've got 4, 6, 8, 12... there's no real hard and fast rules on what these can be... but if you design for Frameworks, or understand them a little bit... especially, if you know where it's going...
if you know the developer uses Tailwind, great, type out all of these. So the big takeaways is, multiples of 8 are good... but really, you should check out how it's getting made, and copy that... it'll make the transition from Figma... to the actual design and development a lot smoother and you don't have to, but I've got a Web Essentials as well... which covers a lot of, the kind of things that we look at here...
like what is a rem, what is a DP, what is Bootstrap, what is Flexbox? There's all sorts of good stuff that you can learn... that will inform your design, when you're in Figma... but kind of outside of the scope of this course... but a little bit of HTML and CSS, and framework knowledge... makes you a better UX designer, in my opinion.
All right, was that confusing? A little meandering... anyway, let's get on to some more hard skills in Figma.