Auto Layout | Techlist.io

figmaJul 23, 20202 min readCurated summary

Announcing Config Europe: a call for speakers | Figma Blog

Figma announced Config Europe, a free virtual conference taking place on September 17, 2020. After its San Francisco event showed both the value of community connection and the limitations of an in-person format, Figma chose an online conference to make participation more accessible. The company invited community members—especially first-time speakers—to submit talks, panels, lightning rounds, and workshops. ## From In-Person Conference to Virtual Event - Figma’s first Config conference brought together 1,200 attendees in San Francisco, with additional viewers online. - Sessions covered topics including design systems and open source’s influence on urban planning and infrastructure. - Plans to take Config to cities worldwide were paused as the global situation changed. - Figma ultimately decided that a virtual format could still fulfill Config’s mission of amplifying community voices and enabling people to learn and share. ## Call for Speakers - Speakers could submit proposals by **July 31, 2020**. - First-time speakers were explicitly welcomed and encouraged. - Accepted speakers would receive: - IT support and equipment - Help from product specialists and editors - Opportunities to develop talks, panels, lightning rounds, or workshops - Proposals not selected for Config Europe might be considered for other Figma opportunities, such as livestreams or blog posts. ## Conference Content Tracks The agenda was organized around four main themes: - **Building and maintaining design systems** - Starting and scaling systems - Creating components and style guides - Getting teams to adopt shared systems - **Figma deep-dives** - Improving workflows with plugins, Auto Layout, components, and other features - **Process, culture, and team-building** - Recruiting, hiring, team culture, and remote-work practices - **Opening up design** - Making design more inclusive, accessible, and participatory for non-designers ## Attending Config Europe - The event was free and open to anyone, anywhere. - Figma planned to publish the agenda and open registration on **August 20, 2020**. - Prospective attendees could sign up to receive updates when registration became available. Figma’s recommendation was to submit ideas through the Config Europe speaker portal or register for event updates. The announcement emphasized that the virtual conference was intended to preserve the collaborative spirit of Config while making it accessible to a broader global community.

Read original

Auto Layout Figma Design Systems Open Source+1

figmaApr 19, 20202 min readCurated summary

11 activities in Figma for your classroom | Figma Blog

Figma’s collaborative, browser-based workflow makes it well suited to hands-on design education. This post presents classroom activities that help students learn Figma while practicing visual design, research, geometry, prototyping, and collaboration. The exercises range from beginner icebreakers to intermediate component and illustration projects, with duplicateable files for educators. ## Getting Started with Figma - **Student trading cards** - An introductory activity combining class introductions with basic Figma practice. - Students create social-media-style profiles using Auto Layout and components. - Working in one shared file exposes students to classmates’ processes and styles. - A gallery page can showcase the finished cards. - **Level:** Beginner - **Features:** Auto Layout, Multiplayer Editing - **Make a heart** - Students create and customize a heart using the Pen Tool, Layout Grid, and the Properties panel. - The exercise builds familiarity with foundational drawing and layout tools. - An optional challenge uses Smart Animate to make the heart pulse. - **Level:** Beginner - **Features:** Pen Tool, Properties Panel, Layout Grid ## Exploring Form, Geometry, and Research - **Figma tangrams** - Students use the seven-piece tangram puzzle to explore geometry and form. - Prompts include creating recognizable animals and experimenting with abstract shapes. - A more advanced version asks students to research and build their own reusable puzzle sets. - **Level:** Beginner - **Features:** Components, rotation, alignment - **Design research paper** - Students visualize research findings in a compelling, readable format. - The class builds a collaborative library of articles that peers can read and comment on. - Reviewing the collection encourages discussion about visual hierarchy and communication design. - **Level:** Beginner - **Features:** Layout Grids, Keyboard Shortcuts ## Practicing Components and Collaboration - **Chat windows** - Students design reusable chat components for conversations and visual feedback. - The activity emphasizes customization and creating components useful in future collaborative work. - **Level:** Intermediate - **Feature:** Auto Layout - **Collaborative illustrations with constraints** - Students work together to create a consistent system of illustrations or icons. - Shared constraints—such as a bespoke geometric grid and limited color palette—encourage cohesion and creative problem-solving. - Peer support and critique are central to the exercise. - **Level:** Intermediate Educators can adapt these activities to their students’ experience levels and duplicate the accompanying Figma community files. Together, they provide a practical progression from basic tool literacy to structured collaboration and reusable design systems.

Read original

Auto Layout Figma User Interface Collaborative Design+2

figmaFeb 5, 20202 min readCurated summary

New ways to create, collaborate, and share more openly | Figma Blog

Figma’s 2020 product direction centers on three priorities: faster creation, more inclusive collaboration, and a broader design community. At Config 2020, the company announced seven features aimed at reducing repetitive work, preserving context across teams, and making design knowledge easier to share. These updates build on Figma’s focus on a reliable, high-performing platform. ## Focus for 2020: Creation, Collaboration, and Community - **Creation:** Automate repetitive design tasks and help users work faster. - **Collaboration:** Include everyone involved in the product process. - **Community:** Give designers more opportunities to publish, learn, and share. - Platform reliability and performance remain foundational investments. ## Faster Design Workflows - **Auto Layout improvements** - Components can stretch to fill their containers. - Buttons resize automatically with their text. - Lists can be rearranged more easily. - These capabilities support responsive designs across device types. - **Redesigned Font Picker** - Prioritizes frequently used fonts, organization fonts, and favorites. - Provides faster font search. - Identifies fonts already used in a file to improve consistency. - **Selection Colors** - Allows fills, strokes, and text colors to be updated together in one action. - Also supports changing these color categories independently. - **Expanded prototype interactions** - Adds triggers for keyboards, gamepads, and accessibility controllers. - Enables prototypes for keyboard shortcuts, game menus, and other device-specific interactions. ## Collaboration Across Product Teams - **Text hyperlinks** - Text can link to external web pages, pages within a Figma file, or frames in the Editor. - Useful for linking requirements documents and building navigable tables of contents. - **Plugin Inspector API** - Lets plugins display important information in Figma’s properties panel. - Can surface action items or identify plugin-generated content, such as maps, for easier updating. - **Prototype-only sharing** - A new permission allows users to share a prototype without exposing the underlying design file. - The feature was planned for Figma Professional and Organization plans. ## Sharing with the Design Community - Figma continued developing its Community platform as a public space for publishing live files. - Community files can be inspected, remixed, and used for learning. - Within its first months, more than 400 creators had published over 1,000 files, including wireframes, icon sets, design systems, device frames, slide templates, and illustrations. Together, these updates position Figma as more than a design editor: it aims to become a faster creation tool, a shared workspace for product teams, and an open learning platform for the broader design community.

Read original

Auto Layout Figma Design Systems Prototyping+3

figmaJan 8, 20202 min readCurated summary

Bringing the community together in Figma | Figma Blog

Figma’s 2020 priorities centered on strengthening its global community as the company and user base expanded. The company planned to connect users through in-person events, improved support, collaborative product features, and a richer platform for sharing design resources. Its broader goal was to make design more accessible and collaboration more effective for entire product teams. ## More Opportunities to Meet in Person - Figma launched Config, its first user conference, in San Francisco on February 6, 2020. - The event emphasized community-created programming, including talks on open-source design, developing future designers, design confidence, and redesigning Chicago.gov. - Figma also planned more local events and user groups in cities around the world. - Users were encouraged to participate either in person or online, and community leaders could help organize events in their cities. ## Expanded Global Customer Support - More than 80% of Figma’s active users were outside the United States, while its support team primarily covered North American and European business hours. - Figma moved its support technology to Zendesk to better serve customers globally. - Planned improvements included: - A new Help Center for self-service product information - Community forums for peer-to-peer support - Streamlined internal processes for faster responses ## Product Features for Entire Teams - After launching features such as Plugins, Auto Layout, Smart Animate, OpenType support, and Design System Analytics in 2019, Figma promised a larger 2020 product roadmap. - The company would continue reducing repetitive design work and improving creative productivity. - Figma also aimed to better support engineers, product managers, and other members of product teams—not just designers. - Files at larger organizations averaged six collaborators, highlighting the importance of team-based workflows. ## Building a More Open Design Community - Figma introduced the beta of Figma Community in October 2019 to let creators publish files for others to inspect, remix, and learn from. - More than 300 creators had already shared around 600 files, including templates, educational guides, and public libraries. - In 2020, Figma planned to expand the number of contributors and resources so both professional and aspiring designers could discover ideas and learn from shared work. Figma’s roadmap combined product development with community-building: expanding events, improving global support, enabling broader team collaboration, and making shared design resources easier to discover and reuse.

Read original

Auto Layout Figma Design Systems Plugins+4

figmaDec 4, 20192 min readCurated summary

Design more, resize less, with Auto Layout | Figma Blog

Figma’s Auto Layout brings structural concepts from CSS flexbox into a free-form design environment. It reduces repetitive resizing and repositioning by making frames respond automatically to their content, while preserving designers’ ability to explore layouts freely. The result is a workflow that feels closer to production code without sacrificing visual experimentation. ## Bridging Design and Development - Traditional Figma designs require manual updates when content changes, such as resizing a button and repositioning neighboring elements. - HTML/CSS and SwiftUI handle these relationships automatically, but are less suited to rapid, free-form design exploration. - Auto Layout combines both approaches by adding flexible, code-inspired layout behavior as a property of any Figma frame. ## How Auto Layout Works - Items inside an Auto Layout frame are arranged vertically or horizontally. - The frame automatically sizes itself based on its contents. - Frames can include padding, fills, strokes, and corner radii, allowing designers to create buttons without extra layers. - Changing button text automatically resizes the button and adjusts surrounding elements. - Spacing is controlled at the container level rather than independently between every pair of items. ## Lists, Menus, and Design Systems - Auto Layout simplifies repeated interface elements such as lists and menus. - Items can be reordered through drag and drop instead of manually repositioning them. - Existing components and design-system elements can be converted using **Shift + A** or the Option menu. - The feature supports more generic components that adapt to different content instead of requiring separate variants. ## Nested Frames and Safeguards - Auto Layout frames can be nested to build complex interfaces, similar to nested HTML `div` elements. - Designers can edit content or move elements in and out of layout frames. - Figma includes safeguards against unintended actions, such as placing a large image inside a button. - Holding **Command** on macOS or **Ctrl** on Windows overrides these safeguards when needed. Figma recommends trying Auto Layout through its playground file, video, and documentation. The initial release was presented as a starting point, with further improvements expected based on user feedback.

Read original

Auto Layout Figma Design Systems HTML+3

figmaNov 19, 20192 min readCurated summary

Opening up the data behind your design systems | Figma Blog

Figma introduced Design System Analytics to help organizations understand how their libraries and components are used across teams. The feature provides usage trends, library comparisons, and component-level data so design system teams can improve what they maintain, guide migrations, and measure adoption without monitoring individual designers. Customer examples show analytics turning usage data into practical design system decisions. ## Improving Components Through Usage Data - Teams can identify components that are widely used, rarely used, or frequently detached. - Microsoft uses this information to determine which Fluent components need maintenance or may no longer be important. - Google found that its button component was detached more than any other component, revealing that the master component was too complex. - The Material Design team responded by creating a simpler button option while preserving flexibility for designers. ## Tracking Library Adoption and Migration - Design System Analytics compares usage trends between libraries over time. - Squarespace planned to replace an older shared library with a new version using Auto Layout. - Analytics helps the team: - Monitor adoption of the new library across teams - Identify which teams are using it - Ensure the old library is gradually deprecated - Reports include component insertions, active teams, total instances, and detachments. ## Understanding Component Usage Across Teams - Analytics allows teams to examine how individual shared components are being used. - Pluralsight planned to use the reports to understand how designers work with components from its design system. - Because reports are available to anyone within an organization, designers and managers can independently investigate usage patterns and learn from other teams’ examples. ## Measuring Design System Impact Earlier - Figma positions analytics as a way to measure design system adoption earlier in the product development process, rather than waiting until implementation. - The article introduces Bukalapak as an example of a company that had previously measured adoption during development, though the provided text ends before describing the full outcome. ## Expanded Capabilities - The original 2019 feature focused primarily on components and library usage. - As of February 2025, Figma Library Analytics also includes styles and variables for Organization and Enterprise customers. - Enterprise customers can access expanded functionality through the Library Analytics API. Design System Analytics is intended to provide feedback for improving and evolving design systems, not to police individual designers. Teams can use the data to prioritize maintenance, simplify components, track migrations, and make adoption measurable.

Read original

Auto Layout Figma Design Systems Component Libraries+1