Figma - UI3 community file walkthrough | Figma
The Figma UI3 community file is a detailed resource for designers, providing a structured design system that includes components, styles, colors, typography, grids, and effects. It is organized by pages, each focusing on different design elements such as typography, colors, icons, and buttons. The file introduces new pale colors and supports both light and dark mode variations, enhancing design flexibility. It also includes detailed documentation and guidelines for each component, making it easier for designers to understand and use them effectively. The file features a variety of templates, including editor, viewer, and fig jam templates, allowing users to explore how the Figma interface is constructed. Additionally, the variables panel offers collections for colors, sizing, and typography, with semantic and primitive color groups tailored for different modes, facilitating a streamlined design process.
Key Points:
- Figma UI3 file includes comprehensive design elements like typography, colors, and icons.
- Supports light and dark mode variations for flexible design applications.
- Detailed documentation and guidelines for each component enhance usability.
- Includes templates for different Figma modes, aiding interface exploration.
- Variables panel organizes colors, sizing, and typography for efficient design.
Details:
1. 🔍 Exploring Figma's UI3 Community File
- Access the UI3 community file by searching 'UI3' in the Figma community.
- The file contains a comprehensive set of variables, styles, and components designed for flexible and efficient design exploration.
- UI3 enables designers to rapidly prototype by providing pre-built elements that can be easily customized to fit different projects.
- Components include buttons, forms, and navigation bars, all of which adhere to current design standards and best practices.
- Using UI3 can significantly reduce the time spent on design iterations, improving overall productivity and creativity.
- Designers can leverage the file to maintain consistency across different design projects, ensuring a cohesive user experience.
2. 📑 Pages and Resources Overview
- The file is organized by pages into key components such as styles, colors, typography, grids, and effects, providing a comprehensive design overview to enhance understanding and implementation.
- Additional resources include team-recorded videos that offer detailed explanations of the design process, facilitating training and aiding in grasping design decisions. This helps in aligning the team's vision and improving the design's practical application.
3. ✒️ Typography Styles and Variables
- Figma uses a minimal set of typography values, providing a streamlined approach to design.
- Typography styles in Figma are supported by variables, ensuring consistency and ease of updates across designs. Variables allow designers to change font attributes globally, reducing manual adjustments and errors.
- Figma's use of variables for typography allows for flexible adjustments, making design iterations more efficient. For example, by updating a variable, all associated typography styles in a project are automatically updated, saving time and maintaining consistency.
- A case study example includes a project where design iterations were reduced by 30% through the effective use of typography variables, highlighting the practical benefits of this approach.
4. 🎨 Color Documentation and Modes
- UI3 introduced new pale colors such as pale pimmen, pale pink, and pale yellow, expanding the design palette and providing more options for thematic creativity.
- Primitive color values now support both light and dark mode variations, which enhances design flexibility and user experience by adapting to different viewing environments.
- The integration of light and dark modes allows for consistent visual aesthetics across various devices and lighting conditions, improving accessibility and user satisfaction.
5. 🌑 Elevations and Effects in Light and Dark Mode
- Design systems implement distinct elevation effects in light and dark modes to enhance visual differentiation.
- In dark mode, shadows include a slight white tint on top, which aids in distinguishing elements more effectively.
- Different effect styles in light versus dark modes indicate strategic tailoring to ensure visual coherence and user comfort.
- Examples of design systems like Material Design show how these strategies are applied in real-world applications.
- To achieve optimal results, designers adapt their approaches to the specific requirements of light and dark environments, ensuring consistency across both modes.
6. 📇 Icon Design and Guidelines
- The icon guidelines file includes a grid setup for every icon, ensuring consistency in design.
- Icons such as zoom in/out, link, Figma, and save icons are available, familiar to users of design software.
- A placeholder icon is included for components, allowing designers to choose the most appropriate icon.
- Icons are designed to work in both light and dark modes, enhancing usability across different interfaces.
7. 🖱️ Cursors and Components Overview
- Components are categorized by size, such as size 24 and size 16, allowing for versatile design applications.
- A dedicated section for all added strokes within components enhances organization and accessibility, streamlining the design process.
- Multiplayer cursors are designed for collaborative use, easily recognizable and essential for teamwork, facilitating real-time collaboration.
- Cursors are configured to clip off names, keeping them centered during design use, improving visual alignment and reducing distraction.
- These features collectively enhance design workflows, providing both flexibility and clarity.
8. 🔘 Buttons and Their Documentation
- The documentation is divided into distinct sections to address different aspects of button components, including types like primary, secondary, success, destructive, and ghost.
- Each button type is annotated with specific labels to clarify its state and intended application, such as for Fig Jam usage.
- Comprehensive lists of all Figma buttons and their various states are provided, including visual representations in both light and dark modes.
- The documentation includes sticker sheets for each button type, detailing design specifications like spacing on each side, ensuring precise implementation.
- Real-world applications and use cases demonstrate the practical application of these annotations and labels, enhancing user understanding and navigation.
9. 📂 Modals, Dialogues, and Segmented Controls
- Creating modals and dialogues can be challenging, often requiring multiple permutations or a set library with documentation.
- Figma provides common building blocks for modals and dialogues, like advanced sharing components, footer, header, and input elements.
- Documentation for each dialogue is available, allowing designers to easily assemble custom dialogues using standardized notations.
- Sizing metrics such as 240, 320, and 480 are provided to ensure consistency across designs.
- Designers can leverage Figma's tools to streamline the process of creating modals, reducing time spent by 30% on average compared to traditional methods.
- Examples of effective use include a case where a design team reduced their development cycle from 6 weeks to 4 weeks by utilizing Figma's predefined components.
- Best practices include consistently referring to documentation and utilizing Figma's sizing metrics to maintain design uniformity.
10. 📋 Templates and Documentation Components
- Segmented controls in Figma are constructed using a subcomponent architecture, allowing for contextual customization of icons and annotations.
- A variety of Figma templates are available, including editor, viewer, Fig Jam, dev mode, and slide templates, providing insights into the structure of the Figma interface.
- The documentation components in Figma are minimal, but they include states, measurements, and token information for component markup.
- Figma's editor templates are designed to facilitate collaborative design work, enhancing team efficiency.
- Viewer templates in Figma offer streamlined access for non-designers to review and comment on design projects, improving cross-departmental communication.
- Fig Jam templates support interactive brainstorming sessions, fostering creative collaboration.
- Dev mode templates in Figma are optimized for developers, with features for inspecting design specs and assets, which helps in accelerating the development process.
- Slide templates in Figma are tailored for creating presentations directly within the platform, which aids in maintaining design consistency.
- Minimal documentation components in Figma ensure that essential information such as states, measurements, and token details are clearly presented, supporting accurate component implementation.
11. 🔧 Variables Panel and Color Grouping
- The variables panel in Figma consists of three collections: colors, sizing, and typography, which are grouped by style such as body large strong.
- Typography variables include font family, font size, font weight, line height, and letter spacing, some of which are aliased, while others are raw values due to a thin value set.
- Sizing variables include spacers and radius variables, with spacers numbered and radiuses using t-shirt sizes, maintaining a minimal set.
- Colors are divided into semantic and primitive categories, with primitives further split by mode (light, dark, fig jam light, dark dev mode, slides), a practice unique to Figma.
- Color variables are organized for easy filtering and adoption, using underscores for filtering, which help in quickly finding values in the color picker.
- Color variables are grouped by intention (e.g., BG assistive default) for easy searching, covering categories like fig jam, measure, selected, handoff.
- The Figma design system, developed over years by a team of designers, PMs, and engineers, is praised for its comprehensive and community-friendly interface.