While many designers have already taken the time to learn some basic skills with Figma, to stand out as a truly proficient UX designer, it helps to know and demonstrate some shortcuts that will improve your workflow and make you a more efficient designer. The following are ten tips and tricks to get you there.
Override auto layout If you've taken a beginner course in Figma, you probably know that auto layout is one of the most convenient features to keep your designs clean and consistent. But inevitably, you'll find a time when you want to add something to your design that doesn't need to align to an auto layout container. However, as soon as you drop that new object into the frame, you might find yourself fighting against the layout rules as the object keeps snapping into an auto layout container and pushing all of the other objects out of place. To drag an object into a frame while ignoring the auto layout rules, simply hold down the SPACEBAR while you drag into the destination frame:
Override constraints Just as it can be frustrating to wrestle with auto layout settings when you don't want them, you will often find yourself fighting with the inbuilt constraints of child objects when you need to resize its parent container. For example, let's take that same grouped list from above. The mouse cursor I placed into the frame is a group of layers and it has a scale constraint in both dimensions, which means the cursor's image will maintain its relative size when its parent container grows: The problem with this constraint is that when I want to increase the height of my frame, the cursor image stretches out of proportion. It's a minor inconvenience, but one that will happen frequently during my workflow and slow me down with
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]