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!

Figma UI UX Design Essentials

Smart Selection & Tidy up in Figma

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents
SECTION: 1
Getting Started 30:36
SECTION: 2
Wireframing - Low Fidelity 11:03
SECTION: 3
Type, Color & Icon Introduction 1:12:34
SECTION: 4
Pages 8:32
SECTION: 5
Prototyping - Level 1 30:08
SECTION: 6
Animation Level 1 10:46
SECTION: 7
Commenting 14:09
SECTION: 8
Moodboard - High Fidelity 13:40
SECTION: 9
Columns 13:54
SECTION: 10
Tips & Tricks 7:21
SECTION: 11
Colors 34:48
SECTION: 12
Text & Fonts Advanced 47:48
SECTION: 13
Drawing 35:41
SECTION: 14
Working with Illustrator 4:16
SECTION: 15
Images 17:55
SECTION: 16
Working with Photoshop 11:58
SECTION: 17
Autolayout & Constraints 52:08
SECTION: 18
Effects 15:30
SECTION: 19
Saving & History 5:42
SECTION: 20
Components & Instances 36:15
SECTION: 21
Variants 23:04
SECTION: 22
Making a form 34:05
SECTION: 23
Prototyping - Level 2 43:01
SECTION: 24
Teams & Projects 5:19
SECTION: 25
Libraries 11:03
SECTION: 26
Animation & Micro Interactions 1:05:40
SECTION: 27
Thumbnail update 4:10
SECTION: 28
Exporting 34:21
SECTION: 29
What next 15:53

Questions

You need to be a member to view comments.

Join today. Cancel any time.

Sign Up

Course info

114 lessons / 12 hours 29 quiz questions 22 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there - my name is Dan Scott & welcome to Figma Essentials.

Together - you and me - are going to learn everything you need to get started working as a UX Designer using Figma.

You can try Figma for free by clicking here.

We’ll use this UI UX design tool to create beautiful User Interfaces and engaging prototypes. Most importantly... we'll cover the client expectations of you as a new UX designer. 

This course is aimed at people new to design, new to User Experience design. Even if you’re not totally sure what UX really means, don’t worry. We’ll start right at the beginning and work our way through step by step. 

First we’ll describe the brief & how to work with a UX persona.  

Then you’ll learn how to create simple wireframes.  

From there we’ll look at how to implement colours & images properly in your designs.

You’ll learn the do’s & don’ts around choosing fonts for web & mobile apps. 

You’ll learn how to create your own icons, buttons & other UI components. 

You’ll learn some pretty scary terms such as Components, Constraints & Multi Dimensional Variants. They are all really easy to understand once you know how. 

We’ll also make our lives easier by using free UI kits & plugins for Figma which will speed up our workflow dramatically!

We’ll build a simple Style Guide ready for client handoff. 

You’ll understand how to make both simple & advanced micro interactions, page transitions & animations 

Before the end of this course you will have made fully interactive prototypes 

You will take a project all the way through -  collaborating with other team members and exporting the right files ready to hand off to your developer or software engineer. 

We’ll be focusing on the software Figma but I’ll make sure to explain the techniques & terms used in the UX and how real world projects are run. You will develop a great understanding of the industry and will be able to manage your own UX projects.

I will be setting assignments through the course which will help develop your skills and enable you to create something special and unique for your own portfolio. 

Alright - it's time to upgrade yourself & go from Figma Zero to Figma Hero.

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

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi everyone, in this video we're going to look at something called Tidy up, super awesome, grab stuff that are not kind of tidy, watch this, oh, look how tidy. Gets better because you're like, actually, I need this guy over here, and look, they swap, oh ho, it gets better. I've got some cards, I need to select them all, tidy you guys up, but also, you know what I need, I need another one of these. Click on it, 'Command D', 'Ctrl D', there's another one, I need another one, ah, so good. All right, I'll get a little excited, in this one, you're going to enjoy it, let's jump in and look at something called Tidy up and Smart Selection. 

All right, let's start with Tidy up, if you select a few things, you might notice that, this little line has been appearing, what does it do? Let's click it, give it a click, it tidies it up, that's what it's called, Tidy up. If I undo it, tidy up won't appear, if you've only got like two things selected, it needs three to kind of do the spacing between them, and also it won't appear if you're already really clever, and you've got great spacing. 

So if I got all these guys, 7 apart, it doesn't appear, because it's like, I don't need to tidy this up. Works as well if I've got, let's say this, this, three stripey lines, change into a grid, when there's kind of a grid, there's more than one row of stuff, or more than two columns, let's click it, and it kind of lines everything up. 

Now it's not like trying to make a complete grid, it just kind of puts this row's even spacing, same with that one, you can see, this is a little bit off, it's not exactly how I thought it would work, but great for kind of doing individual rows. There is a long way, if I select on this, up here, Tidy up, the icon should appear, if it's greater over here, one of those two rules, that I mentioned a second ago are broken. They're already evenly spaced, well, you've only got two things selected, so forget tidy it up now. 

We've got to a point where Smart Selection, this is the favorite, my favorite part of all of Figma. So it doesn't matter if you use Tidy up, or you've just spaced them nicely, or you've used the kind of like, Distribute Horizontal Spacing, as long as they're evenly spaced, you'll get these pink lines and these pink dots. What's good about them, the spaces here in between, watch this, click, drag, whoa! 

So you've got a lot of control over a big group of things, horizontally or vertically. So I've got these, they're different shapes, I do rectangles in different shapes, anyway, let's get the spacing right on them, and maybe we'll even center them up, just because, and maybe we'll even kind of like align them on one side. 

So it doesn't matter, horizontally, vertically, we can drag these, or we can type it in here, say using 16 as your spacing, like awesome, let's go down to 8. They don't have to be exactly the same shape, clearly, I haven't done that, but that's not even the best bit, you're like, is there better bits? There is better bits, these pink dots are the better bits, watch this, if I click on him once, I'll click on the green one, I'm like, "What am I going to do with you?" I need you to be over here, so watch this, click, hold, and drag, look, he moves wherever I want him to go, so good. 

Imagine this with cards, and lists, and icons, we're doing it with rectangles just to go fast, and get the idea. It gets even better, you're like, "No way," yes, way, watch this. Let's say that I have got these, they're all evenly spaced, because all that stuff appears, called Smart Selection, be like, actually, I need another one of these, click it, and hit 'Command D', this makes another one, you're like, "What if I need another kind of yellow one here?" 'Command D', 'Ctrl D' on a PC, and it just adds another one. 

Imagine your big list of things and cards, and, lists and cards, I can't think of anything else. You can just 'Command D' or 'Ctrl D' them and it will make a new one, and kind of separate everything else out. So Tidy up, kind of separate, but they get lumped together, it's just a way of kind of tidying them up. It doesn't really matter whether you use Tidy up, or Horizontal, Vertical Spacing, as long as they're evenly spaced these things appear, with them out, you can see, they're not there. 

Let's do a couple of other, like real life examples, and things that might catch you out, is I've got this icon, this one, and this one, this one here, if I do smart lining up, it's kind of worked, it actually worked okay for mine, it's when you have, let's say we add a circle to our chimney, that's my smoke coming out of it, because these guys are not grouped, and then I go to tidy up, it kind of does weird stuff. 

So if you are having problems, and your icon's made of a couple of parts, just make sure it is either kind of a Boolean, like we learned, or it's a group, or it's a frame, just something to tie it together. These are all tied together, and this one here, are three lines, I'm going to turn it into a frame, I'm going to call this one "Mobile Nav", and now I can use the smart, kind of spacing out, and then I get these. You can imagine, like, especially if you're doing like the kind of testing for, the touch area, and I'm like, actually, I want to move this around, oh. Now you're seeing, you're like, "Yeah, now I get it", good as me. I get really excited by that one, so good. 

Next thing I'm going to do is, I'll show you, it's just good for Type as well, for like menus, I'm going to type in "Home", and instead of doing them in one text box, I'm going to go, you, actually, I'll do three of them, four of them, so duplicate, duplicate, let's have a look, so Home, I'll speed this up. I'm just going to pretend there's more, that's the only one I've got for my Nav, but-- say you got a bunch of lines, they're all in separate little text boxes, and you're like, "Oh, tidy them up." 

Actually, once they're tidied, can I change the spacing? You can, and then can I click one of them, select them all. The pink dots, and these are quite small, there they are, hello, and then you can move them around. Add more of them, click one, 'Command D' or 'Ctrl D', oh, so nice, order for something more complicated real quick. 

All right, I'll bring you back real quick for another little bonus tip, can you see me naming those, probably didn't, was pretty fast, but I find, like a-- name the first one, let's change it to "A", I select it all, I copy, and I can hit 'Tab' on my keyboard to get down to the next one, 'Tab' again, so you don't have to like double click with your mouse, go in, 'Paste', I don't know, is that helpful, anyway. 

So I've created these, they need to be groups, like our icons, kind of combine them. I've turned them into frames, because frames are awesome, but if I select all of these, I thought they were close, you can see, their spacing is close, but it's not, click on this, oh, perfect. Now I get these, like great, and if I decide, actually, they're all recycled, but wait there. So they're all in frames, I kind of made them different, so I can select them all, they've all been spaced nicely, and I can say, actually, I need another one of, what do I need? I need another one of this one. 

So 'Command D', 'Ctrl D', probably need to have them all selected, you, 'Command D', and I could say, actually, you go there, look at that, cool. What it does do, it does push off the frame, you can see the outside frame, one of the quirks. There's probably a way of fixing that, I can't figure it out, what is the size of my page, the width of this, is a width of 375. So I'm going to say, you go back to 375 for me, thank you. 

All right, there'll be no problem if yours, like my design, pushes out to the outside of the frame, so it kind of freaks out a little bit, I don't know, what do you think? Let me know in the comments, is this your favorite thing, what is your favorite thing so far? Let me know in the comments below, I just, I'm going to check back, I'm going to see, this is like as good as it gets, or is there other things that you're like, "Sorry, Dan", this other thing, the flaming, the flaming house. 

All right, so that is Tidy up, which is nice and simple, and then, Smart Selection, which is a little bit, not complicated, but they have to be evenly spaced first, and probably grouped, or stuck in a frame or a component, which we'll do in a bit. All right, I hope you enjoyed it, I will see you in the next video.

Bring Your Own Laptop
  • Powered by Marvin
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy policy
  • © Bring your Own Laptop Ltd 2024