Your complete guide to design principles, UI/UX best practices, and mastering Figma—the world's leading collaborative design tool.
Master these fundamental principles to create beautiful, functional designs
Learn how to use color effectively to create visual hierarchy, evoke emotions, and maintain brand consistency.
Master grid systems, whitespace, and spacing to create balanced, organized, and visually appealing layouts.
Understand font pairing, hierarchy, and readability to communicate your message clearly and effectively.
Create intuitive, user-friendly interfaces by understanding user behavior, accessibility, and interaction patterns.
Guide users' attention through your design using size, color, contrast, and positioning strategically.
Maintain design consistency across components, patterns, and interactions for a cohesive user experience.
Practice your skills with hands-on exercises and challenges
Create a complete button component with multiple variants (primary, secondary, outline) and states (default, hover, active, disabled). Learn to use Auto Layout and create reusable components.
What you'll learn:
Design a responsive card component that adapts to different screen sizes. Master constraints, Auto Layout, and responsive design principles to create flexible layouts.
What you'll learn:
Build an interactive prototype of a mobile app with multiple screens, transitions, and animations. Learn advanced prototyping techniques including overlays and scroll behaviors.
What you'll learn:
Create a comprehensive design system with color palettes, typography scales, spacing tokens, and component libraries. Learn to organize and scale design systems for teams.
What you'll learn:
Expert insights to level up your design game
Design with multiples of 8 (8px, 16px, 24px, 32px) for consistent spacing and sizing. This creates visual harmony and makes handoff to developers easier. Most screens are divisible by 8, ensuring pixel-perfect designs across devices.
Speed up your workflow dramatically by memorizing these essential shortcuts:
Use clear, descriptive names for all layers and frames. Follow naming conventions like "Button/Primary/Default" for components. This makes collaboration easier, helps with plugin automation, and keeps your files organized as they grow.
Set constraints on elements to control how they resize within frames. Pin elements to edges, centers, or scale proportionally. Combined with Auto Layout, constraints ensure your designs adapt beautifully to different screen sizes and orientations.
Avoid "Lorem ipsum" and placeholder images. Use realistic content from the start to identify design issues early. Real text reveals line-wrapping problems, and actual images show how your layout handles different aspect ratios and content types.
Use Figma's branching feature for major design explorations. Create branches to experiment without affecting the main file. Name versions clearly and save them regularly. This makes it easy to review changes, rollback if needed, and maintain a clean design history.
Follow these steps to begin your Figma journey
Sign up for a free Figma account at figma.com. The free tier includes unlimited personal files and up to 3 projects.
Familiarize yourself with the toolbar, layers panel, properties panel, and canvas. Use the toolbar on the left to create shapes, add text, and select elements.
Master these keyboard shortcuts to speed up your workflow:
Explore Figma's community templates to learn best practices and jumpstart your projects. Search for UI kits, wireframes, and design systems.
Master these essential Figma features to level up your design workflow
Create reusable design elements that update across your entire project. Use variants to manage different states like hover, active, and disabled.
Pro Tip:
Use Auto Layout with components to create responsive designs that adapt to content changes automatically.
Build responsive frames that automatically resize based on their content. Perfect for buttons, cards, and navigation menus.
Pro Tip:
Combine Auto Layout with constraints to create truly responsive designs that work across all screen sizes.
Link frames together to create interactive prototypes. Add animations, transitions, and smart animate effects to bring your designs to life.
Pro Tip:
Use overlays and scroll behaviors to create realistic mobile app prototypes with native-feeling interactions.
Work together in real-time with your team. Leave comments, share feedback, and watch cursors move as teammates edit the same file.
Pro Tip:
Use FigJam for brainstorming sessions and workshops before jumping into high-fidelity designs in Figma.
Build and maintain consistent design systems using styles, components, and shared libraries across multiple projects and teams.
Pro Tip:
Create color and text styles early in your project to ensure consistency and make global updates effortless.
Extend Figma's capabilities with thousands of plugins for icons, images, accessibility checks, handoff, and automation.
Pro Tip:
Essential plugins: Iconify for icons, Unsplash for images, Stark for accessibility, and Content Reel for placeholder data.
Curated resources to help you become a Figma expert