10 tips to work 10x faster in Figma

now now cool let's see if it works uh okay that's recording you can go down you can also go down and we're left with this one [Music] are you ready i am so ready welcome back everyone it's been quite a while i'm happy to be back and we're back for figma tips [Applause] [Music] today we're talking about 10 tips to be 10 times faster in figma so these are all the things that i've learned throughout the years learned from watching other people working and it's going to make you so much faster it's some of them are just mind-blowing to me maybe they're going to be something you know already but let's let's hope for a good outcome and you'll learn something new if you haven't my name is carola and i'm a product designer at dropbox make sure you follow and subscribe um well can you follow subscribe i guess make sure you subscribe and like this video if you like what you see so that i know what to make more of now i want to caveat that this is actually going to make you 10 times faster absolutely proven um there's many studies about it exactly 10 times faster not one less known more if you know what i mean you know 10 tips so of course 10 times cool um we're going to start from the basic ones and get into more complicated ones and you'll follow me in figma while i show you so let's start with number one duplicate now i know mostly three ways to duplicate uh objects and one is the basic simple copy paste of an object you just select your screen actually let's select an item you copy you paste it and you've got another one here then there's just another way of doing it which is to comment and control or control d on an object and as you see we have another duplicate here um but these d behave differently if you duplicate an element or frame so just know that if you common d on a frame it's gonna place it on the side if you keep hitting command d it's gonna place it on the side and so on so forth now i created like 100 of them um so let's go back to what we had let's see if i can find it no that's another one so just know this difference and third one which some people just may not know is you can select something like this frame hold down option which i believe is alt on windows but you hold it down and drag now it doesn't stay hold on my screen but i'm holding it um and you drag it this is super useful if you want to like i don't know transition something down here and then if you keep command d it will duplicate in this at the same distance as your first um as your first duplicate that you actually did manually so you can kind of control where things go that's kind of nice all right that's our number one um on to the next one tip number two resize on resize you could spend a bunch of time but let's go straight to the useful part you as you probably know your basic way of resizing is grabbing onto this handle on the side and just resizing like that you see it kind of messes things up um let's say i want to resize this white thing i want to resize it um so that it goes down here and also up here at the same time and at the same distance one way i could do it is is i'll grab onto this and then hold option for it to grow from the center this is super cool very useful when you're like drawing circles whenever you hold option the object is going to be created from the center which is pretty nice but let's say i also want the top and the i want proportions to say locked you probably know this this is super basic but while you hold option you also hit shift so that it keeps it proportional nice but there's one last piece have you ever wondered like you've seen when i resize this how things get kind of messed up because it's a frame and things have their various constraints or they actually don't have them so that's how you mess it up well a little secret and i might have to kill you if you tell around is you just hit k you don't even hold it just hit k on your screen and you'll see that this thing changed from your move tool to your scale tool and look what you can do and you can still do option and make it grow from the center you don't need to do shift actually because it's proportionate isn't that super cool like everything grows at the same size i've looked for this for so long and then i realized i had it in front of me all this time all right so that's it for number two on to the next tip number three it's sort of a continuation of tip number two but you know numbers are kind of um let's see where we go with this number three it's how to resize frames have you ever needed to like resize something um like let's say the actual connect screen um but you don't want things to move with you you just want the frame around it to to move with you but you don't want to deal with the constraints because you're you want to design faster so i mean of course the best way is to design better but if you hold command while you make the frame larger you'll see that well this frame doesn't really have you can't see it because it's white but let's say i make this red you'll see that the frame underneath um if i were to uh make this larger like this it would screw things up but if i hold command it doesn't use the constraints so cool this was also life-changing my manager told me this like a year ago or so and my life was changed completely so with this i'll say let's see number four okay number four is a super super basic one and honestly i see so many people not leveraging this not knowing this so this is just basic computer shortcuts so let's say you want um let's zoom in a bit you want for some reason this word and thomson to be the same size as this now you could be a good kid and do it with styles like you know if you have a design systems they do it and you can leverage that but let's say you're wrapping up like a really quick project um what you can do is select any text style then copy the style and how you do that is kind of like when you copy an object you do comment c or ctrl c and comment control v in this case you just add option or alt you add option you do control command c to copy and then you do option command v and look at that isn't that i don't know this is me revolutionary and you know why because this actually applies to so many places word powerpoint keynote maybe even excel i wouldn't know for sure but this applies to everything it's so so universal and you'll never end up like looking oh which one was this color was this the right color you just con command command option c and like command option v and that's a link there you go easy done okay let's keep this fast on to number five okay this is also like super well known and but someone needs to tell you for the first time so maybe i'll be that person today um if you're into design you probably know this already but you can nudge things of one pixel if you move your arrows but if you want to move faster you can hold shift and arrow around and that moves it in 10 pixel increments i call it like a shift move but you can call it whatever and this is also pretty universal across apps if you want to do it on keynote and you're trying to design a presentation it works and it works there too it works on powerpoint it works pretty much everywhere except on freaking google slides which decided to do the opposite as everyone else where with arrows you move 10 pixels and with shift arrow you move of one pixel so thank you google slides there you go you've got the next one and i'll add a bonus tip here that is if you need to change the number of your nudge you just go on nudge amount and let's say you work on an 8 pixel grid this is going to change your life you make nudges of 8 pixels and so you'll you'll always be within the grid now don't ask me why i don't have that i am a sick person that doesn't like comfort and i like to have things done the hard way i i like to just do 10 and then back and back it doesn't make any sense it's not logical don't do it your your the people you work with are gonna hate you because you're not gonna be a consistent person and you're gonna have to do the extra work so don't do like me use whatever grid your team uses and set your nudge amount up to that amount cool now i mean that was harder to explain but yeah let's go next up tip number six you know how if i create a rectangle here and well let's make it actually smaller let's say this is an icon or set or something you know how figma if you want to drop it into your already designed stuff you need to figure out in which group you want it to be and it sort of out of drops it in that group and most of the time this is extremely helpful like this it's already inside the input group and that's really cool but let's say sometimes i don't want that sometimes maybe actually let's do this i want this to be the search icon have please have a lot of imagination in this case this is not a search icon but imagine i want this here and in some sort of animation that i want to create i want this to still be within this group but appear make this something that masks the content and make this appear from the side like from here let it slide in and some whatever product there may be many other reasons why you want this to stay within this group while you move it around um and so how do you do that you drag it but you see that if you do this it's gonna remove it from the group you see it here so what we want to do is before it leaves the frame before it does this so let's revert it back to where it was click on it hold space bar and then drag it to wherever you want it to be maybe you want it to be midway here cool that's that's where it is or you know one way this is super helpful is if you are actually creating arrows let's say again have imagination let's say this is an arrow and let's give it an end okay now i've got it here well i guess it's a weird arrow but you see how it drops it inside i want it to be on the outside and then i hold space to keep it on that outside layer now let's let's make it a little bit more normal without the liner on this side um but this is super useful when you're trying to connect things and you don't want this freaking arrow to go inside the frame you want it to stay above and on top of everything so you just hold the space bar while you move it around so it doesn't get in isn't that super cool all right more goodies this was yeah a little harder to explain but let's get to the next one keep talking about layers so tip number seven how do you move things up and down so let's say we have our rectangle that is sort of on top of everything we want this to be um as a background you know so what i can do is look where it is and drag it below everything that i want but one much easier way is to hold command open square bracket to push it down you press it as many times as you need but this will move its position in the layer list there are some exceptions let's say this is inside a frame doing this up and down is never going to move it under the frame as you see even if it if you don't see it anymore it's still within the group it will move it within whatever group it is in the layer list but it's already pretty useful like this so open bracket and close bracket to go up and down all right this was a quick one next one and tip number eight rename let's stay on the layers topic you've got um invite via email you've got all sorts of weird names here actually sorry i apologize but let's say we want to call this list um i could right click and do all the things but i always go for command r which also works on most things as a rename shortcut and i'll just name it or i'll just name it list and there we have it um and you just hit return super super easy uh we're getting close to the end so number nine let's get to it okay so tip number nine is auto layout auto layout is not really a tip but the tip that i have for you is the moment that you think you might have needed auto layout you're already too late and you should have had other layout already this is because if you get into the habit of making most of the things that you use as auto layout components your life is going to be so much easier your your future self is gonna thank you so much now just check this out you see that here i don't have any of that and like if i wanted to add whatever underneath this i would have to manually move everything down such a pain but here conveniently this is like the cooking shows where they have the food braiding on the other side but yeah i have the food ready on this side casually just came out of the oven um and this is all done throughout the layout just to show you what the difference looks like if i want to just add another line here i'll just command d and it pushes everything down let's say i don't need the select all but i just need the text up there you just delete one i want this and let's say i want this to be i don't know on the left side it could be here and you just i don't know call it whatever you can say whatever but see like i didn't have to do anything to move things around this just just proves how this is gonna make your life so much easier now outer layout is not the most simple thing to use i realize that it's not super super easy but this is why figma did a really great job at creating videos and video tutorials specifically for auto layout maybe i'll do some in the future but for now i'm trying to link it below so get down in the description box and click on that figma auto layout link they do an amazing job i mean they actually made the product so who else could explain it they explained it better than better than anyone so with this drum roll are you ready for the last one now hang on tight tip number 10 is template now this is not a feature that exists in figma so you can maybe i don't know maybe then across your mind maybe you don't need it but if you find yourself repeating over and over the same things like maybe i always create the same pages within the document maybe i always put in a bunch of like old screens of my app to use as reference or maybe i want those iphone mock-ups to always be in my files because i use them constantly or maybe arrows or post-its um sometimes you're not ready to just import all the libraries or maybe you don't they're not libraries they're just things that you have and may need you can consider uh creating your own template and it's not a real template but you create a file a starter file like a boilerplate and you just duplicate that every time now i don't have a lot of ways to show you but i have my own template that i use every time and i'm going to link it down below i've shared this in another video but consider it if you want to include cover pages um structure organization dividers for how you want to divide up your screens maybe a section for prototypes it's also like a guideline to remind you like all the things that you have to do of a design i don't know i kind of like it and it makes your life easier this is a hint figma please create templates um if you're not doing that already okay so this was our last tip of the day thank you so much for following along and i hope this made your life easier these are things that i could not live without um i i just rely on these things so much that it felt sort of bad not sharing it with people um so if this is interesting let me know i'm happy to do more if i think of other tips and tricks that i use every day please comment and let me know what was your favorite tip what blew your mind the most let me know i'm super curious because some of these like i just found out last year and and it just changed my life okay cool well enjoy your day with my friends and go back to designing and be as fast as you can so you can get more time for yourself cheers [Music]

Channel: Carola Pescio Canale

Views: 219,898

Rating: 4.923048 out of 5

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Id: i-9mgOL3mHw

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020