Organize Your Figma File Like a PRO

mastering figma doesn't make you a great designer but having a well organized figma file sets you up for design Excellence this video is organized into three parts team project and files when you finish watching this video you will already know how to organize your figma team project and file in a way that works for you and your organization now let's talk about teams if you are working solo like I do I will just have a team with my name and these are the projects inside that team depending on your organizational structure figma's official guide recommends the following ways number one organizing by line of business this is best for teams where designers are responsible for particular products you could add platform prefixes like this number two organizing by platform this is best for independent teams who work on specific operating systems number three organizing by initiatives this is best for product teams that are grouped by feature this is an example on how Spotify organizes their team by having a project for random ideas like playground product specs new feature Explorations new initiatives lastly you can organize by pillars this approach is used by teams like figma because figma has distinct features that fall under a single product offering they have have a dedicated team for each pillar so each team has their own space to work on new feature updates how do you organize projects in a team to keep your projects on the sidebar hover over here click on favorite and it will appear on your sidebar this is how mine looks like I have design in progress shipped personal products workshopping references and other stuff for companies the first way to organize a project is to have one project for each product surface for example an e-commerce website can have an account project card project home page project and a product listings project under each project it will have its own files the second way to organize a project is to have one project for each feature or production State this community file is a very good example on project and file structures for shipped and Feature work basically you are organizing your projects based on what what is currently live and what is currently in progress the third method is to have one project for each stage of your design process so for example you have work in progress review development shift and archive with this approach you can allow developers to only see projects that are ready for development one more thing you can do is pin a file to the top of the project like this now let's talk about page structure or freelance projects I have everything in one figma file depending on the complexity of the project it can look like this or this for an extensive project you can have these Pages a cover mood board or visual research user research another section for Discovery flow prototype local components or design system a page for designs that are ready for development and a bin or an archive page for discarded designs you can separate these Pages using a spacer page basically it's an empty page where you rename it using underscores so it looks more organized let's set a file cover press F go on to figma community file cover right click set as thumbnail your file cover should have your status file name a description of the project the team's name and a visual if you want more ideas on how to design your figma file cover go on to community just search for figma file cover or something like that and you'll see a bunch of ideas here so let's move on to organizing your designs I like to use figma and light team that's just my personal private I like to set the page background to dark gray instead of using the dark mode in my designs page I like to have a page summary where I'll have the project name a problem goal relevant links to let's say the jira ticket fig Jam board the PRD Google Slides or whatever and a list of the team members names so that if there are any questions regarding this page or this design we know who to look for you could also include a developer onboarding guide to guide developers on how to use figma and how to export an icon from figma if there are any prototypes that you want people to click on you could include them here as well in terms of annotations I like to section each flow this way and if it's something that's ready for development I'll just click here it will have this status ready for development I like to have white text or white arrows to show where each screen leads to as long as your annotations are clear enough that they developers or the stakeholders know where each screen leads to you're good to go if I have built a pigman prototype for this flow I will add a button somewhere for easy navigation just use a widget in figma so for widgets you can just go here insert your url or whatever you can just say figma prototype like this and you're done for freelance projects this is how I organize my Design Systems page I have everything in one place including logo colors font icons button input Fields number drop down and everything else for larger projects or if you work in an organization it is best practice to have a separate file for your design system in that file go to assets publish all these as a component as long as a design system library is enabled you can plug and play no matter which design file you're on when you update anything in this design system file you can select one or more items to publish it and then each design file that has component updates will be notified to review the changes another useful widget that I like to use is to-do list one of my favorite is this one I love to use this to-do's to keep track and keep everyone aligned on what's done and what's pending now in my design files I like to have a status for each section and this is using a widget called status drop down by Alexei shushkov I could actually change the statuses like not starter design in progress under review and approved another way is you could just move sections that are ready for development into a separate page called ready for development or something like that so that the developers will just focus on building the designs that are in that page your files version history is auto saved so you can go back in time to see a specific design version or restore a previous version you could add a version save it so that you can roll back to this specific version for freelance projects sometimes you want to document the clients comments and list down the design changes that has been done but maybe you don't want it to be a version history because it's harder to access and the clients probably don't know how to use this feature I like to duplicate my page and set a version number so for example design project version one and a date I'll usually document the different changes like this I'll point out what has been changed when was it reviewed so I've made a very simple figma file template where you could download for free in the description inside you will find some useful resources for some of the things that I've mentioned just now and I hope that this video brings you value next up find out what I wish I had done or continue doing when I was starting out as a product designer and I'll see you in that video bye [Music]

Channel: Rachel How

Views: 51,885

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Id: etinyRV4UgY

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023