5 Figma Tips for Speeding Up Your Design Workflow

The Figma tips that will save you a lot of time

Figma is an incredibly powerful cloud-based design software. It gains so much popularity for the last two years because of its unique features.

So, without further delay, let’s dive into today’s five super-fast Figma tips.

What you will learn

• Placing a group of images
• Faster access to image crop settings
• Create reusable styles
• Copy a single property
• Avoid reinventing the wheels

Placing a group of images

Cards without image placements

Let’s say you have a bunch of cards and each contains a rectangle background. You want those rectangles to be filled with images.

How to do it?

Press the shown key combinations to open up file library dialog

Select all image files in the library and click “Open”

Hover your mouse onto a rectangle until you see the blue borders appear, then left-click to place images

Faster access to image crop settings

Image crop settings and its panel

Often, after we place an image, we want to adjust its crop settings to change what’s shown inside the boundary.

I guess a lot of people would feel it’s tedious because it takes at least three clicks until the crop settings appear.

Is there a faster way to do this?

First, left-click to select the image rectangle, not the entire component

While the image is selected, hold down “option/alt” and double-click to access the image crop settings

Move or resize image according to your need

Creating reusable styles

Similar objects with an identical colour

What if you want multiple objects to apply the same colour, but don’t want to adjust each of them manually?

The answer is: Creating Reusable Styles.

Figma style is a powerful tool to keep track of the colours, types, or even effects that designers may want to reuse.

But before you can use them, you need to create one first:

Select an object, adjust the colour as you wish, and click the four-dots icon beside “Fill”. Click “+” to add a new colour style and give it a name.

Once you have created a style, it will appear on the objects you apply and in the “Local Styles” panel

Then, you can go ahead to apply the same style with just a few easy clicks

Now, what if you don’t like the current button colour and decide to change it?

How to do this?

Method 1: select the styled object, press the debug icon beside the applied style, and adjust the colour accordingly

Method 2: while no object is selected, on the “Local Styles” panel, click the debug icon beside a style, and you will navigate to the same interface as Method 1

You probably noticed changing the properties of a style will affect all objects using it. That’s why it is so convenient to use Figma Styles on the go!

Copy a single property

Two rectangles with different properties

Let’s say you have two rectangles on the canvas, each with different properties. You want to only copy the “drop-shadow” property from one to another.

How to do it?

Click on the first object, click on the gap right before the little sun icon. Once the property is selected, press the copy shortcut and select the second object to paste

This trick applies to all styles including, Fill, Stroke, and Effects.

Avoid Reinventing the Wheels

You don’t have to build everything from scratch.

Another reason why Figma becomes so popular is its ever increasing size of community. Many creative designers build and share various projects through its community.

These projects include pre-built UI kits, fonts, design systems, icons, fakers and anything you name it.

When you need to build something that’s trivial, like icons, you can search through Figma’s community to find one that fits to your need.

Then, import it and start to copy its objects to your own design files.

Browsing through Figma’s community and importing community project

Conclusion

Today, we have learned five useful Figma tips to speed up your design workflow. They are group image placements, crop settings access, reuse of styles, copy a single property and import community projects.

Learn well and practice these, you might even find more hidden tricks behind these tips.

Moreover, if you feel like Gifs are not a good idea of teaching, let me know, I’ll adapt to your needs.

Thank you for reading!

Credits

Figma