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Figma UI UX Design Essentials

Scale vs Selection Tool in Figma

Daniel Walter Scott

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Okay, let's look at Scaling versus the Selection tool, because you're going to need both of them, and they're a bit quirky from other programs that I've used, and yeah, caught me out at the beginning, so let's do it together. 

So with my Selection tool I'm just going to click on the rectangle, I'm not in Object Editing mode, remember, and all I want to do is, I've got this tool here, the default tool, and I can click the edge, and I can drag it around, that's kind of how you imagined it, and that's most of the time what you want to do. 

What you'll notice is that the Stroke stays at 2 the whole time, and if I do something else, let's say that I select both the text and the rectangle, and I'm like, I want it to be bigger, and I drag it out, huh, that's weird, maybe if I hold Shift, hold 'Shift', still doesn't work, that's where the Scale tool comes in. 

So there's times where you actually want to just make everything bigger, Stroke, Type, everything, and it's this tool here, hiding underneath the Selection tool, click, hold, drag, don't hold and drag, just click and hold, and there it is there, the Scale tool, click on that, I've got both of these selected, and I can just click and drag this, the corner there, and if I hold nothing down, it does it kind of proportionately, scales it up, both the Stroke, can you see, the Stroke got bigger, and the font, and the rectangle. 

So there's times when you need both. Let's say, in this case I've drawn this too big for what I need it to be. So I'm going to go to my Scale tool, and I'm going to make it a bit smaller, and both the font, because I use that as the rectangle, and my little stroke gets smaller. I'm going to bring it to the front using my square bracket. Even if you group stuff first you still got to use the Scale tool, what I mean by that is, let's say that we do-- what have we got? These two, select them both, I'm going to right click it, I'm going to say, you have grouped that selection, and I'm going to use my normal old Selection tool, it still does the same thing even though you think I've grouped it, still does the weird stuff. 

So you've got to switch to the Scale tool, and you do it so often, that there's a shortcut, and you're like, "Excellent, that's easy to remember." It's probably S, because it's the Scale tool, nope, it's K, I don't know why, but don't worry, the S tool, if I hit 'S', it's the Slice tool that nobody uses. There's people out there, probably use it, but I never do, it's a big waste of a good shortcut, so we have to use K, that's just the way it is. So V is the shortcut for the Selection tool, and K, you end up toggling, I go , again, I'm trying not to do too many shortcuts, just the ones that are really helpful, and I'm going to, I'm going to beat them into you throughout this course, so you're going to go to the end, and be like, "I know it's K, I know it's V," because they're helpful, and it's hard to remember them sometimes, so you need some beating. 

All right, so K, and you can scale them up, perfect. So back to the Selection tool, and off to the next video.