Designing in Figma? Up your game with these two critical tools

Jeremy Abrams
Bootcamp
Published in
10 min readAug 6, 2021

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Figma is a revolutionary cloud-based design platform that simplifies team collaboration and absolutely crushes the risk of losing your work from unwarranted crashes (I’m looking at you, Adobe). With that said, it’s still relatively young and is always evolving. It wasn’t too long ago that powerful features like Auto Layout and Variants were still on our wish list (not to mention Smart Animate, gif support, and plugins). If you’re like me and always striving to keep up with the latest and greatest, you’re going to want to learn how to apply Auto Layout and Variants to your design systems. But I’m not going to lie, it’ll take some getting used to. These tools require you to adhere to a disciplined architecture and forbid quick-and-dirty, experimental changes to frames (a.k.a artboards).

So is it worth it? Absolutely, and here’s why.

First Things First: What Are We Talking About?

Auto Layout

In the most simplistic terms, Auto Layout allows you to combine multiple layers into a single row or a single column, with each layer equidistant from the next.

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Bootcamp
Bootcamp

Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Jeremy Abrams
Jeremy Abrams

Written by Jeremy Abrams

Fullstack designer with a background in HCD, research, and development. In a prior life, I acquired a JD and was admitted to the IL state bar in 2014.