How to organize Figma files for maximum productivity

I'm going to show you how I like to organize my figma files for large product design projects I've tried many different ways of doing this but this is the absolute best way to do it that I know of this is how we used to organize files at my previous job at Citibank so it's been tested thoroughly in an Enterprise setting but it's also going to work very well for any kind of team or company the main benefits that you'll get from following the structure are each of your designs will be very easy to find it will be very obvious what stage each design project is in and you'll have a clear history of each handoff and iteration as time goes on I'm going to post a link to the file templates in the description below so you can start using the structure immediately and now I'm going to show you what each of these files look like and give you a more in-depth explanation of how to use it so here's how you're going to split up the folders in your project so each section or feature or bit bigger feature in your app is going to be split up into its own folder so let's say that you're working on a software as a service app that has a dashboard analytics page settings page and profile page each of those would be split up into four different folders like you see here so you just have something like this but duplicated four times so now I'll get into the folder and show you how the the main files work so the main files that you're going to have are your main project file and your archive files so the project file is what you're going to be working in day to day where you're going to be iterating on on designs you're going to be exploring different concepts doing reviews and then doing handoffs and then you're going to have your archive file for all previous handoffs from a project and then you can also have multiple project files within a folder so if this is one big section of an app like let's say this is a dashboard folder for example you could have multiple different projects going on within that dashboard so let's say you have the main dashboard screen and then you also have different screens that appear as modals within that dashboard so those can each be their own different project files so you can have multiple project files multiple archive files within a folder now I'll click into a project file and show you how this works so we click into it and we have a cover page that works as a status indicator to show where where what stage of the project it is in so I have it said as sandbox review or handoff you can customize this however you want but I think this works pretty well so sandbox would be when the project is in the early stages where you're coming up with different concepts and figuring out how that design could work and then once you have some Concepts ready to show to the team then it will move to review and then once that those designs are approved then it would move to handoff so the way that you you uh set the indicator here is you just click into each of the pills and then you can turn on or off this blue fill over here so that allows you to easily change the status indicator and then on the sidebar you can see that we have different sections for handoff review and sandbox so I'll show you what to do for handoff first so we have two different files within here so we have annotations and specs and then we have the clean designs so the way that I like to do this is that you're going to hand off one version that has different notes any kind of specs that you need to include such as padding or margin numbers and then I also included this Frame here that's a quick note about what's new in this file so when you're handing this off to developers that's very helpful for them to see so that they can just get a quick overview of what's different about this file versus the handoff before and then the clean designs would be just only the designs without any notes without any sort of um and without anything else besides the designs on this file next you'll have your review files so I would suggest coming up with some name for each review so let's say you're doing a cross-functional design review so name it that right here cross-functional design review and then put the date right next to it and if you have multiple reviews that you're doing for a project then just add more files right here within this review section and next you'll have the sandbox so these can be pretty messy files here where you're just coming up with different ideas that will eventually go into a review file so that's everything for the working project files and now I'll show you what the archives look like so you'll click out of the project file go back to home and then click into archived so I have a different background here this is just a transparent background on the cover page just to show that it's different from the working project files so we'll just show archived here no no need to change anything on the cover and then over on the sidebar you're just going to have either handoff files from each previous version or you can include handoff and review files here in the archives whatever you think is is going to be helpful so I would suggest just copying and pasting everything from prior handoffs and moving it over here making sure to include the date of each handoff so you can look back here and have a clear record of everything that was handed off within this different section or feature so that's about everything for this whole template if you have any questions about this please let me know in the comments below and I will get back to you quickly thank you for watching

Channel: Kyle Torres

Views: 15,415

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Id: QrtJcKZ-2lg

Length: 6min 42sec (402 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023