Hi, everyone in this video, we're gonna look at something called constraints. Constraints allow us to do fun things like this. Can you see the navigation along the top? Ok. It allows us to say stick to the top left, you stick to the top, right, that's backwards. But you get the idea, we'll throw in a little bit of auto layout at the end of this course, as well as a combination to make your brain explode. Join me in this constraints, extravaganza. All right. Let's start off with some basic stuff. So let's just do a couple of shapes. I'll fast forward this. OK? So I've got some shapes and let's say that I wanna make an ipad version of this. OK. So I'm going to duplicate this just because I got wreck it. Ok? I'll call this by my ipad version. OK? And by default, if I grab the edge of this and kind of stretch it out, it does some stuff. You're like, why didn't that stay there? It's trying to be responsive. OK? And it's evenly spreading and you're like, it's not what I want. I just want you...

to stick in the top right. Hand corner like Dan showed us. OK. So we're gonna look at constraints, constraints are always there. We've got them already. So let's say this kind of the word Scott. You can see his constraint to the top left. These guys here also top left. That's not what I want. Let's start with this triangle here. I wanna say yours constraint to the top, right? OK. Of the top, right? OK. Now, if I drag it, look what happens. That guy sticks right to the edge. What I might do is group these guys, but I'm gonna use framing instead. OK? So command option G or control alt G OK? To make it a frame, let's call this my uh icons. And I'm gonna say, instead of constraining to the top left, constrain to the top, right. So they're all together. OK? And I drag them out, look at that they constrain. So that's the constraints. You can get it to stick to the bottom. Let's do it for this guy. So we can say you are constrained to the bottom left which is not gonna work. It's kind of what I want. Let's turn it off first, let's go back to the top. So if I go into here, I drag it out, you're like, no, I want you to be constrained to the bottom left and it's gonna kind of work. Watch this. Hey, stuck to the bottom. But I want to actually stretch across all of them ok. So you can say you're not just stuck to the left or the right, you can do both. It's hard to click these things. You can do them in here, but you can go left and right, both of them together and the bottom. Now, watch, click on this. Hey, constraint and the bottom. So that's what constraints are we're gonna use them for navigation. That's a really good use case. I use them a lot for cards which will, we'll do some kind of nice use cases in a little bit. But that's the basics. The things to note here is let me zoom in. Can you see the little dotted lines there? OK. It is going from this to the right. I'm not sure why it's not. It should go all the way to the edge. A little bug. OK? So it's showing that if I go to the left, can you see it over there? Well, you can't, you can kind of see the beginning of it there. OK? So it's constraining to the outside frame. You won't see constraints. If this, this guy, let's go to zoom out. This guy copy and paste is outside of a frame. He's in no man's land. Look no constraints. He's gone. When I move back on, he's got constraints. So he needs like a parent frame for constraints to work. That's one thing. So at the moment, we're kind of going all the way out to this, like beginning frame often. What will happen is you'll put all of this stuff in its own frame. OK? Maybe call it NAV, in its own parent frame, maybe call it NAV, so that these guys are all kind of like jammed inside of this nice little group. So let's do that. My icons are joined. I might actually join these two guys together first. So instead of grouping member, we're gonna set it into a frame. So these two units here are going to go inside their own frame. So let me just name things. So it makes it a little bit clearer. Logo, these two guys inside of a frame, please. Maybe we'll draw the frame first. Let's do it the other way cos I'm gonna grab my frame too. We've been converting lots of things into frames. You can start with a frame. Mm That's gonna be my navigation. OK? And give this frame a background color. There we go. It's gonna be black in this case. That'll do, I'll use my dark gray. Let's have a look which I've realized A is in the dark and B is just green. You might have seen it earlier on in the cause and you're like he's just making green. Can he tell I didn't when it was small? But when it's big, uh it needs to be adjusted. We're gonna leave that for the moment. I'm going to uh break it and make it a whole lot less green hint of green, Dan, not of all the green. OK. So we've got this frame that these logos are inside. The reason they went inside is because I had them selected first, then drew a frame, they kind of nestled inside. If they don't, you can just drag them inside. So this is gonna be my n the nice thing about this is instead of using the outside of the entire thing because now I watch this. If I adjust the old frame, it doesn't work. But it means I can use this as a nice copy and paste unit and move it around. OK? But what I need to do is adjust it again. OK? So that these guys are in the top right of this frame. So let's give it a go. So I'm gonna undo go back to this one. So we've got our NAV which has got these two things inside of it. The logo is defaulting to the top left. That's fine. The icons though go top right. Now when I adjust you bigger or smaller, that's what constraints are for. And that's how you end up with these like mad things that you've borrowed off other people and you're like, it's so confusing. It is, it is a little bit. OK? So yeah, the thing to remember is that they need to be inside of a frame. OK? Remember when we had them out here, couldn't see the constraints. You can use the outside like, like the whole frame that we're using, what we're calling like the ipad or the mobile, it's up to you. But in this case, I've made a friend that says Nav, and those guys are inside. All right now, I want you to take a pause. Did you get it? Was it OK? If you were like, if you were like, man, I didn't follow much of that. I want you to maybe skip to the next video. Now if you were like, yeah, I'm following it. Keep going. OK. We're gonna go one level deeper, more inception. We're gonna combine a couple of things. We're going to combine the constraints which we just learned with something else we learned. OK. Remember the auto layout. OK. Auto layout. Was that navigation there? OK. And we use auto layout for these buttons here. So let's use auto layout for these guys. So I'm gonna go inside, find my icons there they are. OK? And instead of this being a frame, I'm gonna make an auto layout. Remember one of the cool things about auto layout, it's kind of like a smart selection. Click on that. Now I can go into here and I can adjust this really easily. I can play with the order. I can add another 11 D oh Look at that. And because it's constrained to the top right, it's kind of pushed it that way. All combining stuff. OK? So auto layout is separate from constraints. But if you combine them, you can get some fancy stuff and you will get some fancy stuff from other people. And now, you know how it's constructed, maybe. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Can he like, you know, this one, like if I grab the ipad size and I make it kind of ipad size, but this doesn't go and I can go in there and I can do that. That's perfect. Um Could we just do what we did down the bottom here? Ok. And say for the navigation, you are top left. What if I said you were top left and right, then we grab this whole frame and it does what this one did and goes left and right. It's too much. All right. Forget I said that I will see you on the next video. We'll do a few more examples together of like Real World auto layout and mixing with constraints and all that sort of goodness because it's good. It's tough, but it's good. All right. Onto the next video.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

BYOL_Figma_Cheatsheet.pdf

Exercise_Files_-_Figma_Essentials.zip

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Daniel Walter Scott

Multi-award winning, influential media designer & Adobe Certified Instructor with 15+ yrs of experience.

SEE INSTRUCTOR'S CLASSES

topics covered in this class

UX Design

Ratings and Reviews

Mahyar Hassid

Great class, Daniel drops so much knowledge in every video and in all the in between unexpected moments that helps speed up your process!

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

How To Use Constraints In Figma

How To Use Constraints In Figma

Lesson Info

63. How To Use Constraints In Figma

Lessons

Introduction to Figma Essentials

Getting Started with Figma Training

What Is Figma For & Does It Do The Coding?

What's The Difference Between UI And UX In Figma

What We Are Making In This Figma Course

Class Project 01 - Create Your Own Brief

What is Lo Fi Wireframe vs High Fidelity in Figma?

Creating Our Design File & Introducing Frames In Figma

The Basics Of Type & Fonts In Figma

Rectangles, Circles, Buttons And Rounded Corners In Figma

How To Use Color In Figma

Strokes Plus Updating Color Defaults In Figma

Object Editing And How To Escape In Figma

Scale vs Selection Tool in Figma

Frames vs Groups in Figma

Class Project 02 - Wireframe

Where To Get Free Icons For Figma

Matching The Stroke Of Our Icons

How To Use Plugins In Figma For Icons

Class Project 03 - Icons

How to Use Pages in Figma

How to Prototype in Figma

Prototype Animation and Easing In Figma

Testing On Your Phone with Figma Mirror

Class Project 04 - Testing On Your Phone

What is Smart Animation & Delays in Figma?

Class Project 05 - My First Animation

Sharing & Commenting on a Figma File with Stakeholders

Sharing & Editing With Other Ux Designers In Figma

How I Get Inspiration For Ux Projects

How To Create A Mood Board In Figma

Class Project 06 - Moodboard

How to Work with Columns & Grids in Figma

Tips, Tricks, Preferences, and Weirdness in Figma

Color Inspiration & The Eyedropper In Figma

How To Create A Color Palette In Figma

How to Make Gradients in Figma

How to Create & Use Color Styles in Figma

Class Project 07 - Colors & Columns

Fonts on Desktop vs in Browser in Figma

What Fonts Can I Use? Plus Font Pairing In Figma

What Common Font Sizes Should I Choose In Web Design?

How to Make Character Styles in Figma

Lorem Ipsum & Placeholder Text In Figma

Useful Things To Know About Text In Figma

How To Fix Missing Fonts In Figma

Class Project 08 - Text

Drawing Tips And Tricks In Figma

Squircle Buttons with ios Rounded Courses In Figma

Boolean, Union, Subtract, Intersect and Exclude with Pathfinder in Figma

What Is The Difference? Union vs Flatten In Figma

Class Project 09 - Making Stuff

Smart Selection & Tidy Up in Figma

Do I Need To Know Illustrator With Figma?

Tips & Tricks For Using Images In Figma

Masking & Cropping Images In Figma

Free Images & Plugins For Figma

Do You Need Photoshop For Ux Design In Figma?

Class Project 10 - Images

What Is Autolayout & Expanding Buttons In Figma?

Class Project 11 - Buttons

Auto Layout For Spacing

How To Use Constraints In Figma

Combining Nested Frames Auto Layout & Constraints in Figma

Adding Text Box Autoheight to Autolayout in Figma

Class Project 12 - Responsive Design

Nice Drop Shadow & Inner Drop Shadow Effects In Figma

Blur Layer, Background Blur & Image Blur in Figma

How to Make Neumorphic UI buttons in Figma

Class Project 13 - Effects

How To Save Locally & Save History In Figma

What are Components in Figma?

Updating, Changing & Resetting Your Components

You Can’t Kill Main Components In Figma