“Sticky Notes” in Figma: Improve your UX design workflow with components and variants

In this article, I’ll walk through how I use Figma’s components and variants to document design thinking, save myself loads of time, and have fun!

I’ll show you a few different ways that I’ve approached annotations in my design files over the years, and a 10-step beginner’s guide that shows exactly how I build my most-used Figma “sticky notes” using auto-layout, components and variants.

First, a confession.

A couple years ago, you could not get me to use auto-layout. Like a kid that hates broccoli, I resisted any Figma power tools despite knowing they were ‘good for me’ as a designer. Then components and variants came out and I resisted those too…

Boy was I missing out! Today, I am a [cmd+a] auto-layout addict, and use components and variants literally every day to improve my design files and save myself hours of time.

Whether you’re already comfortable with these tools, or not — this article’s for you! I’ll show you three different ways I’ve approached annoating design files, and will walk through precisely how I create my favourite components in Figma — crafted, versatile, and playful “sticky notes” that any designer can start using right away.

But first… a quick evolution of annotations

The sticky notes I use today are actually the third evolution in my Figma annotation process.

First, I used colored rectangles above designs to indicate my confidence level. These were easy to make in two seconds (hit r for rectangle tool, draw a box above your designs, and set the fill color).

Use a basic traffic-light design system: green for high confidence, orange for moderate confidence, and red for low confidence.

These served me well becuase they’re super fast and simple to create — and visually impactful. But quickly I wanted to add a bit more standardization to how I left contextual comments as well.

And so, my next evolution of annotated notes was to have the colored bars, with some emojis (for fun), and a single sentence string.

Evolution #2: Colored bars, emojis, and one sentence for comments

The goal was to be able to quickly annotate as I iterated (and iterated). This worked quite well for smaller UI components. In this example, I was iterating on how we might include keyboard shortcut hints for an existing button.

What’s great about the colored bars, is that when you zoom out, it’s easy to spot high-confidence iterations at a glance. The addition of short annotation strings helped me remember my ‘why’ when I was presenting and discussing design decisions with teammates.

At a glance, it’s quick to find the green ‘high confidence’ iterations to discuss

But while this was great for smaller UI elements, I needed more robust note-taking tools for larger files that had more context and complexity.

And so, what started as three types of colored bars to indicate confidence on iterations, is now this…

Component stickies on the left, and sample usage on the right

On the left are the components I use in Figma today. They’re styled to match these needs:

• Notes on my confidence scale (high, moderate, low) — using traffic-light color system of green, yellow-orange, and red
• Informational notes on general context (eg. help doc links, project scope considerations) — blue
• Design system notes (colors, alignment, layout etc.) — purple
• Relevant quotes from user research — white
• Implementation considerations and Eng notes — black
• Questions—brown

I’ve come to believe that the 🏆 golden standard of design file annotations is when we can back up design rationales with evidence from relevant user research. One of my favourite things I’ve added to these notes is that I can now easily record user quotes directly in my design files. This also makes it easy for other teammates to build empathy for why I may have pivoted, or explored certain concepts more or less.

Here’s an example of how I’ve been using these notes in my files today (actual designs have been abstracted to protect IP).

An example of how I use comments to preserve rationale and implementation notes for final build files

How are these different from Figma comments?

I still use Figma’s commenting feature for collaboration, but these “sticky notes” are a more permanent way of embedding relevant context, rationales, and considerations — directly in the design file.

Here’s the standard I hold my files to — if another developer, or designer, had to step in and take over this project for any reason, they should be able to jump into my files and rapidly get up to speed on any design considerations, important context, and implementation notes — all in one place.

Simply put, having an easy to use and standardized way of preserving context during the design has become a critical part of my design workflow. This is true whatever the stage of the project: exploration and discovery, deep iterations, or final build specs.

Make your own “sticky notes” in 10 steps!

Here’s how I make these components, in 10 steps. Copy mine or take them as inspiration and style them any way you like — crafting them can be such a fun design activity in itself. 🥳

I’ve included the full Figma window in these screenshots, so you can see the auto-layout, and component & variant settings in the side panels.

Step 1: Create the title

I used Helvetica, 8px, All caps, bold.

Step 2: Create the body text

I used Helvetica, 12px, regular.

Step 3: Add emoji

Start a new text frame, and insert an emoji (on a mac, use shortcut: ctrl+cmd+space)

Step 4: Add auto-layout

Create a frame of just the text, using auto-layout (on a mac, use shortcut: shift+a). These should be vertically stacked.

Step 5: Add auto-layout again

Create a second frame that includes the emoji — this will be horizontally stacked, and all elements pinned to the top left corner.

Step 5: Set a fill & shadow

Add a fill to this second frame you just created, and add padding. I’ve used 12px left and right, and 12px top and bottom. I added a drop shadow and set the color to gray 🌈. I also rounded the corners to 4px.

Step 6: Test!

I always like to test long text strings to ensure that the auto-layout settings are working properly. This box should grow vertically with more text, while maintaining fixed width. ✅

Step 7: Duplicate and design (have fun!)

There are a number of ways to start building components and variants, and this is just one. I like to design all the notes first, and then create a component set. This is where you can let your creative flag fly! As long as the notes are readable, and there’s some thoughtful use of color that’s easy to scan (green for high confidence design iterations, and red for low confidence or warnings, as examples) — you can go ham and play with shadows, different emojis or icons, colors, gradients, and more.

Step 8: Create component set

When done, select all your components and click the diamond icon in the top of the Figma toolbar. Create a component set. (Note: you can always add more variants later on, so you can start with just a couple of variants and add more as needed).

Step 9: Name variants and properties

Click on one sticky note (variant) and in the right panel of the Figma toolbar (in the section called ‘Current variant”) name the variant properties. I called the variant property “style” and named the grey variant “default” in this example. Repeat for the other variants.

Step 10: Create text properties

Click into the body copy, and in the Content section of the figma side panel, click the little icon of an arrow in a diamond to “create text property”. Name this text property ‘body text’ and leave any placeholder value that you want. This will allow you to quickly edit the body text of your sticky notes directly from the Figma toolbar, instead of having to click into the note itself.

Note: I didn’t make the title a text property, because I want to keep the same titles for each note.

Example of how you can type new text in the Figma side panel

Et voila! Start improving your files and saving time with these notes…

These notes save me so much time, and add a level of consistency to my design files that also makes them easier to share my thinking with my team. As an added bonus, these annotations make it much easier for me to remember my own thought process and learnings when revisiting old files. If you don’t already have a standardized way of documenting thoughts in Figma, I recommend giving this ago!

Now I can swap between note styles in two clicks. So when I’m in Figma, I just add a note, click into the side panel, and select the variant I need.

In the screenshot below, you can see how I’ve named each variant so I can quickly find the color and style that I want.

Then, I just go tippy-tappity and type my thoughts all in the Figma sidepanel. Boom! Thanks to auto-layout, the sticky notes expand and contract depending on how much I type. It’s pure magic.

If you’re part of a design team, you can create and share these notes as part of a Figma library to save everyone time and maintain a consistent way of annotating your files. Amazing!

In conclusion

I’m always iterating on my designs — and my design process. Drop me a comment below and let me know how you like to leave annotations in Figma. And, of course, keep me posted on if this article was helpful to you, and if you give these “sticky notes” a go!

~v