Constraints and Adaptive Layout

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Make your design adapt to any screen

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Design System in Figma

10:14

Basic Layout and Techniques

19:49

Constraints and Adaptive Layout

15:13

Styles and Team Library

22:02

Components and Nesting

18:44

Booleans and Shapes

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Icons and Vector Network

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Export, Inspect and Code in Figma

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Multiplayer and Commenting in Figma

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Prototyping and Interaction

11:42

Switching Between Devices

When you select the Frame, you can switch between Portrait and Landscape. You can also change the device entirely. But as you do that, you’ll notice that the layout doesn’t respond at all to the change. That’s because we haven’t set the constraints yet.

Organizing

Organize your Groups as you would build your site in code. For example, if you’re planning to use CSS Grid or Stack, the Title and Text should be grouped together with a spacing of 40px. Moreover, they should be contained in a root Hero group to allow contextual positioning. Root containers should take the whole width because they often have a background.

Since constraints depend on their parent container, it is essential for them to be organized properly.

Left or Right, Top or Bottom, Center

By default, the constraint is set to a fixed distance from top and left. You can also choose to set a fixed distance from any of the other borders, or from center. This ensures that your element keeps its size while aligning itself against the borders.

Let’s set the Header, Play Button, Text, Watch Button and Logos to Top, Center.

Left and Right, Top and Bottom

Additionally, you can decide that the distance is fixed from Left & Right or Top & Bottom. This means that your element will resize itself while keeping a consistent distance against the borders. This is especially useful for Groups that contains flexible content, like text layers. It’ll be handy when we’ll start designing Cards and Modals that need to resize.

Let’s set the Background to Left & Right, Top. Notice that we didn’t need to set the constraints for the Hero group because the constraints are already set for the inner elements.

Scale

While it’s not a popular use case, Scale can be useful for elements that resize based on the percentage of the container. It may be useful for assets like images or icons.

Resize Artboard

Often times, when you don’t set the constraints properly, your content can scale strangely when you increase the height of your Artboard. Fortunately, it’s been fixed.

Let’s set the Home Frame’s height to 1440px.

Design for Mobile

As you build your site, it’s important to think how it will look like on a phone. Currently, it’s impossible to set constraints that scale the font sizes or completely change the look of a menu. So we’ll design the mobile experience separately.

We’ll do a lot of copy and paste from our Home frame since they share almost the exact same properties.

8-point Grid

For mobile design, the 8-point grid is generally recommended and is consistent with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which promotes 8 points between elements and 16 points from the borders. Since we design at 1x, 1pt is equal to 1px. To learn more about pixel density, I suggest reading this.

Background

Copy and paste the Background and set to 375 x 752px.

Text Group

Copy and paste the Text group, 160px from the top. Turn on the Scale tool by pressing K. Resize the left and right side so that it’s 16px from the sides. Scaling usually create half pixels, so I suggest manually set Title to a font size of 40px and the Text to 20px. Finally, you can change their heights to 128px and 88px respectively. Don’t forget to press V to turn off Scale afterward.

Watch Button

Copy and paste the Button and set to center, 40px from the Text.

Logos

Copy and paste the Logos and divide them into 2 Groups, while keeping a consistent 40px distance between each. Group them again and set to a distance of 40px from the bottom.

Constraints

If they’re not set, make sure that Text Group, Watch Button and Logos are set to Top and Center. For the Background, set Top, Left & Right.

Fix position when scrolling

This option is useful for prototyping. Thanks to this, you’ll be able to create a Tab bar or Navigation bar that sticks to the top or bottom of your interface.

Let’s enable this for the Menu.

Play Prototype

You can preview your prototype by clicking the Play button in the top right, next to the Share button. Make sure to set your iPhone X frame’s height to 1500px or more to allow for scrolling. Once in Present mode, you’ll be able to see a fixed Menu with blur. Pretty cool! We’ll go much deeper into prototyping later.

Smallest Device

When you design for mobile, it’s best to go as far as the 320px width, which covers still popular devices such as the iPhone SE. Duplicate the iPhone X Frame by pressing Command + D. If everything was set up properly, you just need to adjust the Text group and the Logos group.

For the Text, press K to enable Scale, and resize the box to be 16px from the left and right sides. Press V to disable Scale and back to Move.

For the Logos, do the same resizing: 16px from left and right.

In the end, you should have something that looks like this.

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Basic Layout and Techniques

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