Hello everyone, let's talk about... when you should make components, when you shouldn't... and some of the quirky things to do with components when you're making them. Let's start by making this into a component because we--  these are two separate auto layouts, you can see them over here... the little icon is not our lovely waffle shape, or these diamonds... so we're going to convert it, the first thing that's going to happen...

it's going to be kind of weird, watch this... I've got it selected, I'm going to use my shortcut... which is 'Command Option K' on a Mac, 'Ctrl Alt K' on a PC... and click that, and it's going to convert it into our component, great... what happened over here? It spat out all of these internal components...

so these were inside my auto layout, it went, hey, you can't be inside of here... so they spat them out and left instances of those components inside... let's have a look... so let's undo it and have a little breakdown... just so you get an idea what's happening. So inside of here are these, these are my main components...

these rule all the other components on all the other options... and it is best practice not to just leave them on page 1, a lot of people do... and they can work... the trouble is, is that we can't have these main components... that control all of these, inside another main component... so when you make it, use your shortcut...

remember, 'Command Option K' on a Mac, 'Ctrl Option, sorry, 'Ctrl Alt K' on PC... it goes, you can't be in here, and spits them out over here... and we've got these components going on over here... and they're not even inside of this frame just kind of hanging out underneath it. So what we can do is, that's fine, like totally fine... let's collapse these up, I'm going to grab them all...

and turn the eyeball on, on this one... because we turned it off before, grab them all... and with them selected I'm going to just move them over here... let's zoom in on them a little bit... if you've got them selected, remember, you can hit 'Shift 2'... and it will like jump to what you've got selected...

and we're going to use this 'Tidy Up', just because tidy up is awesome... did you notice before, when up here I couldn't do tidy up... because the icon doesn't fit... so you've got to zoom in, here it is... you just got to be in a zoom level where this thing fits... and just do them nicely, like that, great.

So that might happen to you, and you might not even notice... you'll end up with weird stuff kind of hiding under other layers... and it's a bit of a problem... but hey, we worked it out. The other thing is that we're not going to leave this here either... because, on the first frame, you can...

I don't imagine I'm going to put this into another component, but I might do... so it's just good practice to drag it off over here... holding down my 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC... click, hold, and drag, and just move it over here... and what I've got is, actually, let's just drag the whole-- don't drag that... let's drag the actual icon itself.

So I'm going to keep my main component over here, and let's keep an instance... on my first Artboard, there we go... he's now a component, this one here needs to get switched out... they all need to be the instances, and because we've got the setup sweet... oh, we should be able to just go, you, look at that, oh, good... you can see here, this one is set up to Auto, so is this one...

all controlled nicely by our main component over here, we got it. Now the question of when to make components... is there's no like specific rule... when you're at your kind of initial design stage... and you're just kind of like messing things around... you don't need components, it's not until you get that second frame...

and especially, for things like buttons and any icons... they should always be components, because you're going to reuse them... but like me, you'll end up doing stuff where... you kind of like, make, you know, make a little card here... and you end up duplicating it instead of making components... and then there is nothing controlling them all...

so you've got to go through and redo everything... or at least adjust every single one... so you end up bumping into, when you need components. Last thing about components is that... when you're storing your main components off to the side... often could be on another page, when you've got a slightly large document...

I keep them on the same page when the design is quite small... there's a lot of messing around, I want to go back to the main components a lot... so I just pop them over the side here, but when you've got them over the side... it's really important to put them inside of a, kind of a placeholder frame... so the 'F' key for Frame tool, and I'm just going to put them on this... I'm probably going to make it a different color...

just so I can see the contrast of the white... why are they inside there? Mainly so-- let's bring this out here... so it's not inside of a parent frame... just hanging out by himself, the main component... there's nothing over here that you can set the constraints...

the constraints are-- let's click on this one... because it's inside of my phone frame... it says, I can set the constraints to the top or the left... in my case, probably the bottom left... because I want it to stick down to the bottom of this frame... means, when I adjust this one, adjust the parent frame...

can you see, it sticks to the bottom, perfect... but I want to do that for the main one, so it sets the default... so every time I drag one out I have to change it... but over here, look, I can't do that, ah, but when it's inside, oh, don't do that... drag the name, when it's inside this, can you see, the constraints appear... because it's inside of a parent frame, even just like a place holder.

I'm not using it for anything else other than to say, that is it... so that when I drag new ones out it's got the default of bottom and left... there you go. Main components can't be inside other main components... and it's handy to have them all inside of a placeholder frame... even if it's on another page, just so you can set things like your constraints...

oh, one last tip about it as well, is that... you can't delete things in components... so if I go into here, and before... remember, we deleted something, it went away from in here... if I hit my 'Del' button... the nice thing about a component is, can you see the eyeball, just turned off...

let's move this over so you can see... so I went 'Del' on my keyboard, goodbye, it just turned the eyeball on and off. So that's the cool thing about components, is that... you can't delete stuff... if you want to delete it you've got to go back to the main component... and then delete it from here.

So making our elements that we're building a little bit more resilient... and making sure, when other people are using them... we're giving them to other members of staff... they're not wrecking it, and completely removing bits... they're just turning the eyeball on and off... there we go, that became a little longer than I thought...

we're just going to turn that into a component... there we go, I hope you learned something, next video.