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Everything Developers Need To Know About Figma

If you aren’t using it yet the name Figma is surely a name that you’ve heard more and more over the last few years.

Figma is a relatively new design tool that is browser-based. This means you don’t need to install it locally or buy expensive licenses to give team members access to design files. This has made design more accessible than ever and that’s why many developers now find themselves needing to learn how to work with design tools.

Since many developers don’t have a lot of experience playing around in design tools we’ll cover all the basics developers need to know about so you can confidently navigate around Figma and extract any information you might need when working with the designs sent to you by a designer.

I’ll also cover some specific Figma features that make it easier for developers such as providing CSS information about elements used within the design.

A Quick Note About Shortcuts

Most shortcuts are written for both Windows and Mac, where the Ctrl key on Windows corresponds to the Cmd key on the Mac, and Alt is used for both Alt (Windows) and Option/Alt (Mac).

For example, Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + C is Ctrl + Alt + C on Windows and Cmd + Alt/Option + C on the Mac.

Developer Handoff

To understand the hype around Figma and why you suddenly find yourself needing to learn how design tools work as a developer, it’s helpful to look back on the developer handoff process before Figma was around as it has changed significantly.

Design teams used to send an email to the development team with dozens of attachments containing static images of the design, exported assets, and even word documents with the page copy. Developers usually didn’t have access to the full design files as licenses for design software were expensive and not strictly necessary. Communication and feedback were scattered across email, project management tools, and meeting notes. Everyone was struggling with keeping track of changes to the design; every time the design was updated, it needed to be sent to everyone involved — yet again.

As design tools modernized, this process got more streamlined. Designers would often use separate tools like Zeplin or Invision to handoff the designs to developers. Developers now had better access to the designs and had more tools available to extract information about typography, colors, and measurements. Although it was easier to find the latest version of a design for everyone, designers needed to work in separate tools and keep them in sync. A big improvement but still not perfect.

Figma is a design tool that is rapidly gaining in popularity and shakes up the design handoff process once again. Figma is browser-based so everyone can use it regardless of their operating system and without installing anything. It’s also completely cloud-based so everyone is always looking at the latest version of the design and has built-in collaboration tools making collaborating and communicating easier than ever.

If you want to follow along with this article (or just play around with Figma), I’ll be using this file to explain everything in this tutorial:

The Basics

When you are added as a collaborator on a Figma design you can choose to open it in the browser or you can download the desktop app (available on Windows and macOS). The desktop app is not a native app but a cross-platform electron app like Slack and Visual Studio Code. The functionality of the browser and desktop versions is largely the same. The desktop app does have built-in support for using local fonts whereas the browser version requires installing the Figma Font Helper before you can use local fonts.

Figma’s interface is split into three major parts. In the middle, you’ll find a big canvas where all the designs are located. On the left side, there is a sidebar that contains the layers, assets, and pages of a file. The right toolbar contains all information about elements in the file.

A file can have multiple pages and every page has one canvas. Designers often use pages to separate and organize different parts of the file with separate pages for the design system, icons, or other file assets.

When opening up a new file for the first time, make sure to familiarize yourself with the different pages within the file. If the designer you are working with has made a separate page for all colors, typography, and icons it can save you time while building out the design.

Navigating Figma

Before we get to the good stuff, it’s important that you can quickly navigate around in Figma so you can work more efficiently.

When you open a file you’ll start on the largest zoom level that fits all the frames in the visible area.

  • You can zoom in or out by holding Cmd ⌘ and scrolling up/down or by pressing the + and - keys.
  • If you want to scroll horizontally on the canvas you hold the spacebar and drag with your mouse.
  • You can zoom in quickly on a single frame or element by selecting it and pressing Shift + 2.
  • Quickly return to where all elements fit in the canvas by pressing Shift + 1.

Don’t worry too much about remembering these shortcuts for now, just know that they are available and you can always view these and other available shortcuts by pressing Cmd + Shift + ?.

Once you have used a shortcut it will be colored blue so you can easily see which ones you still need to learn.

Project Styles

When you’re opening a brand new project it’s helpful to set up all the basic styles first. Figma displays all the project styles in the right sidebar. Here you can easily find all the typography, colors, grids, and other styles used in the design.

Note that the project styles will only display if no element is selected. If you want to cancel your selection and view the project styles, simply click somewhere in the canvas or use the Esc key.

You can use this information to set up your layout, variables, and fonts in CSS. Simply click on the edit icon next to the style element to view all information about that style.

If you double click an element, it will select one nesting level lower every time you double click. This is a great way to drill down into an element until you get to the desired selection.

There are many more ways to select and navigate layers, this article just covers the basics that are used 80% of the time. Figma’s documentation teaches more ways to select and navigate layers.

Once you select an element, you can click the Code tab in the right sidebar to display all the CSS information about that element.

It’s important to note that the CSS is automatically generated and is not perfect, especially for positioning elements. Don’t copy all CSS 1-to-1 to your project but instead use it as a guide and a quick way to get information about elements.

Dimensions And Measuring

Whenever you want to measure spaces between elements, correctly position elements, or even set the right margin or padding, all you need to do is select the element that you want to measure from, then hold the Alt and hover your mouse over the element you’d like to measure the distance to.

Depending on what type of file you are exporting there will be different export settings you can tweak. Images only have a scale multiplier and you can choose the file type (PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF). Figma will use the name of the layer as the file name but you can add a file name suffix. You can then export the selected element using the export button.

Quick tip: You can also quickly export an asset by right-clicking it, hovering on Copy/paste and copying the image or SVG code. This is useful if you don’t need to have custom export settings and just need a quick copy of a single element.

Export all Assets

You can export each individual asset by selecting it and clicking the export button but you can also export all assets that are exportable at once.

If you want to export all the assets from the design in one go you can go to the main menu, and click Export.. under the File menu. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Shift + Cmd + E on MacOS or Shift + Ctrl + E on Windows.

This will display a list of all the items in the file that are marked for export. You can then inspect the dimensions, file type and exclude any files before making the final export. If you hover over the thumbnail of the assets it will display the file name that the asset will have when it’s exported.

If you need to make adjustments, clicking on the thumbnail of an asset will select that element in the canvas where you can easily adjust the export settings.

If you have a lot of exportable assets in a single file, you can use a slash “/” in your layer name to mark it as a group of assets. Figma will then automatically create a folder for that group and export the assets within that group to the subfolder.

User Flow And Animations

Figma also supports a variety of animations for transition between states or pages, for opening modals or menus, for dragging and swiping actions on mobile and much more. You can preview these animations by clicking the play icon in the top right to open Presentation view.

To view the information about an animation, select the Prototype tab in the right sidebar and you’ll see the user flow displayed in blue arrows in the canvas.

Clicking on the arrow shows you all the information about that specific animation. Each animation consists of a trigger, an action, and a transition.

This simple animation opens a hamburger menu. You can see that the hamburger icon has an On Tap trigger, once it is triggered it will Navigate To the screen where the mobile menu is in an opened state. The transition type is a Smart Animate transition which means Figma automatically interpolates between these two states. It does this using an Ease Out animation function with a duration of 300ms.

This information is necessary to exactly replicate the animations in CSS but unlike all other element information, animations can not be found in the Code tab!

Communication

If anything isn’t clear and you’d like to ask someone else on the project for clarification. All you have to do is click on the chat bubble icon in the top toolbar or hit the C key to switch to the Comment tool.

You can now click anywhere in the design and start typing a comment or question about that element. Once you’ve finished writing your comment, you can use the V key to return to the normal cursor.

Note that not everyone will automatically receive a notification that you left a comment. If you want to be sure someone sees your comment you should mention them using the @ symbol just like on Slack or Twitter.

Every comment is visible to everyone who has access to the design as there are no private comments/chats. Once the issue has been resolved it can be marked as such and the comment will gray out.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far in Figma and you should be able to navigate around and extract all the information you need from any Figma design file sent your way. Getting information about typography and colors, measuring margins, padding and position of elements, exporting assets and collaborating with other team members.

If you want to learn more about the tool, Figma’s documentation is a great place to start or search when you want to learn more about a specific feature.

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Let’s Make One of Those Fancy Scrolling Animations Used on Apple Product Pages

Apple is well-known for the sleek animations on their product pages. For example, as you scroll down the page products may slide into view, MacBooks fold open and iPhones spin, all while showing off the hardware, demonstrating the software and telling interactive stories of how the products are used.

Just check out this video of the mobile web experience for the iPad Pro:

Source: Twitter

A lot of the effects that you see there aren’t created in just HTML and CSS. What then, you ask? Well, it can be a little hard to figure out. Even using the browser’s DevTools won’t always reveal the answer, as it often can’t see past a <canvas> element.

Let’s take an in-depth look at one of these effects to see how it’s made so you can recreate some of these magical effects in our own projects. Specifically, let’s replicate the AirPods Pro product page and the shifting light effect in the hero image.

The basic concept

The idea is to create an animation just like a sequence of images in rapid succession. You know, like a flip book! No complex WebGL scenes or advanced JavaScript libraries are needed.

By synchronizing each frame to the user’s scroll position, we can play the animation as the user scrolls down (or back up) the page.

Start with the markup and styles

The HTML and CSS for this effect is very easy as the magic happens inside the <canvas> element which we control with JavaScript by giving it an ID.

In CSS, we’ll give our document a height of 100vh and make our <body> 5⨉ taller than that to give ourselves the necessary scroll length to make this work. We’ll also match the background color of the document with the background color of our images.

The last thing we’ll do is position the <canvas>, center it, and limit the max-width and height so it does not exceed the dimensions of the viewport.

html {
  height: 100vh;
}


body {
  background: #000;
  height: 500vh;
}


canvas {
  position: fixed;
  left: 50%;
  top: 50%;
  max-height: 100vh;
  max-width: 100vw;
  transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
}

Right now, we are able to scroll down the page (even though the content does not exceed the viewport height) and our <canvas> stays at the top of the viewport. That’s all the HTML and CSS we need.

Let’s move on to loading the images.

Fetching the correct images

Since we’ll be working with an image sequence (again, like a flip book), we’ll assume the file names are numbered sequentially in ascending order (i.e. 0001.jpg, 0002.jpg, 0003.jpg, etc.) in the same directory.

We’ll write a function that returns the file path with the number of the image file we want, based off of the user’s scroll position.

const currentFrame = index => (
  `https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/airpods-pro/2019/1299e2f5_9206_4470_b28e_08307a42f19b/anim/sequence/large/01-hero-lightpass/${index.toString().padStart(4, '0')}.jpg`
)

Since the image number is an integer, we’ll need to turn it in to a string and use padStart(4, '0') to prepend zeros in front of our index until we reach four digits to match our file names. So, for example, passing 1 into this function will return 0001.

That gives us a way to handle image paths. Here’s the first image in the sequence drawn on the <canvas> element:

As you can see, the first image is on the page. At this point, it’s just a static file. What we want is to update it based on the user’s scroll position. And we don’t merely want to load one image file and then swap it out by loading another image file. We want to draw the images on the <canvas> and update the drawing with the next image in the sequence (but we’ll get to that in just a bit).

We already made the function to generate the image filepath based on the number we pass into it so what we need to do now is track the user’s scroll position and determine the corresponding image frame for that scroll position.

Connecting images to the user’s scroll progress

To know which number we need to pass (and thus which image to load) in the sequence, we need to calculate the user’s scroll progress. We’ll make an event listener to track that and handle some math to calculate which image to load.

We need to know:

  • Where scrolling starts and ends
  • The user’s scroll progress (i.e. a percentage of how far the user is down the page)
  • The image that corresponds to the user’s scroll progress

We’ll use scrollTop to get the vertical scroll position of the element, which in our case happens to be the top of the document. That will serve as the starting point value. We’ll get the end (or maximum) value by subtracting the window height from the document scroll height. From there, we’ll divide the scrollTop value by the maximum value the user can scroll down, which gives us the user’s scroll progress.

Then we need to turn that scroll progress into an index number that corresponds with the image numbering sequence for us to return the correct image for that position. We can do this by multiplying the progress number by the number of frames (images) we have. We’ll use Math.floor() to round that number down and wrap it in Math.min() with our maximum frame count so it never exceeds the total number of frames.

window.addEventListener('scroll', () => {  
  const scrollTop = html.scrollTop;
  const maxScrollTop = html.scrollHeight - window.innerHeight;
  const scrollFraction = scrollTop / maxScrollTop;
  const frameIndex = Math.min(
    frameCount - 1,
    Math.floor(scrollFraction * frameCount)
  );
});

Updating <canvas> with the correct image

We now know which image we need to draw as the user’s scroll progress changes. This is where the magic of  <canvas> comes into play. <canvas> has many cool features for building everything from games and animations to design mockup generators and everything in between!

One of those features is a method called requestAnimationFrame that works with the browser to update <canvas> in a way we couldn’t do if we were working with straight image files instead. This is why I went with a <canvas> approach instead of, say, an <img> element or a <div> with a background image.

requestAnimationFrame will match the browser refresh rate and enable hardware acceleration by using WebGL to render it using the device’s video card or integrated graphics. In other words, we’ll get super smooth transitions between frames — no image flashes!

Let’s call this function in our scroll event listener to swap images as the user scrolls up or down the page. requestAnimationFrame takes a callback argument, so we’ll pass a function that will update the image source and draw the new image on the <canvas>:

requestAnimationFrame(() => updateImage(frameIndex + 1))

We’re bumping up the frameIndex by 1 because, while the image sequence starts at 0001.jpg, our scroll progress calculation starts actually starts at 0. This ensures that the two values are always aligned.

The callback function we pass to update the image looks like this:

const updateImage = index => {
  img.src = currentFrame(index);
  context.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
}

We pass the frameIndex into the function. That sets the image source with the next image in the sequence, which is drawn on our <canvas> element.

Even better with image preloading

We’re technically done at this point. But, come on, we can do better! For example, scrolling quickly results in a little lag between image frames. That’s because every new image sends off a new network request, requiring a new download.

We should try preloading the images new network requests. That way, each frame is already downloaded, making the transitions that much faster, and the animation that much smoother!

All we’ve gotta do is loop through the entire sequence of images and load ‘em up:

const frameCount = 148;


const preloadImages = () => {
  for (let i = 1; i < frameCount; i++) {
    const img = new Image();
    img.src = currentFrame(i);
  }
};


preloadImages();

Demo!

A quick note on performance

While this effect is pretty slick, it’s also a lot of images. 148 to be exact.

No matter much we optimize the images, or how speedy the CDN is that serves them, loading hundreds of images will always result in a bloated page. Let’s say we have multiple instances of this on the same page. We might get performance stats like this:

1,609 requests, 55.8 megabytes transferred, 57.5 megabytes resources, load time of 30.45 seconds.

That might be fine for a high-speed internet connection without tight data caps, but we can’t say the same for users without such luxuries. It’s a tricky balance to strike, but we have to be mindful of everyone’s experience — and how our decisions affect them.

A few things we can do to help strike that balance include:

  • Loading a single fallback image instead of the entire image sequence
  • Creating sequences that use smaller image files for certain devices
  • Allowing the user to enable the sequence, perhaps with a button that starts and stops the sequence

Apple employs the first option. If you load the AirPods Pro page on a mobile device connected to a slow 3G connection and, hey, the performance stats start to look a whole lot better:

8 out of 111 requests, 347 kilobytes of 2.6 megabytes transferred, 1.4 megabytes of 4.5 megabytes resources, load time of one minute and one second.

Yeah, it’s still a heavy page. But it’s a lot lighter than what we’d get without any performance considerations at all. That’s how Apple is able to get get so many complex sequences onto a single page.

Further reading

If you are interested in how these image sequences are generated, a good place to start is the Lottie library by AirBnB. The docs take you through the basics of generating animations with After Effects while providing an easy way to include them in projects.

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