Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Work with Columns & Grids in Figma

Hi, everyone in this video, we are going to create our Hi Fi frames. We're gonna add our columns. That's these red things here to both desktop and mobile and we look at the grid that goes into the app design. Now, I do get a little bit into the weeds here to help explaining why we're doing if your brain melts. Um The only thing you need to remember is 12 is good. Just make 12 columns. All right, let's jump in. Ok? To get started with this one, we're going to do some renaming of pages. So um I'll fast forward this. Alright. It wasn't much to fuss but I just put Mobile Lo Fi or our wireframe, ok? And I'm gonna add two more pages, two more pages and we're gonna have mobile, I'll fast for this as well. Ok. So I've got these are the ones we worked on earlier. I'm gonna start on a separate document for the Hi Fi. I often do this. I don't wanna, you know, bring along any baggage of random junk in this one. So I'm just gonna start again for mobile and desktop. We're gonna shift to doing deskto...

p for a little bit. Uh No other reason just to mix up this course. So I'm on my desktop. Hi, Fi OK. My high fidelity version, I'm going to go to my frame tool. I'm gonna pick a desktop size and this is a really common desktop kind of size to design for. It's pretty in the middle of lots of things. Uh It will change over time, that'll probably change as well. You can Google like most common desktop size in your region. OK? If you're working with a country that doesn't have big technological adoptions or the opposite, OK. You might have really big screens in your city or country or industry you design for that. So let's talk about our columns. So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. So uh to do the columns, click on the frame name. OK? And I'm gonna actually call this one name it as I go home page. OK? And over here there's something called the layout grid. We're gonna hit the little plus button and we're gonna get a grid. That's what we don't want. We want to click on this little uh grid layout settings. OK? And go from grid to columns and we've got the count that we don't want, we want 12. OK? So we're going to do 12 to start with and explain why we're using 12. Some of you will know some of you won't, but why are we using 12? Because everyone else does. And because you'd be really weird if you use 11 or 13 and we want to be, I guess following the industry standards, there's no real rule that says you can't use 13 developer though, might hunt you down and have strong words with you because 12, there's a lot of frameworks that they're going to use, that use 12 as a default. And why we like it is that it's easily divisible as a designer. So we can go in this and say, all right, this is my NAV and this is going to be my say Hero Box. OK? With my big image and my big marketing message in it. And then I'm going to have some feature boxes and I'm going to have four of them. And the cool thing about 12 is that everything is kind of easily divisible. There's enough detail to separate these four into it. But we also could go actually, I want to have three kind of feature boxes or cards or things. OK? And it's still easily divisible. So we like 12. We do a similar thing for mobile. So mobile frame, I'm gonna go phone iphone eight. I'm gonna go layout grid. The little plus. Don't want a grid. I would like a column of 12 because Dan said so OK. And I'm going to change the say the Mudge. No, the gutter, the gutter is a space between columns, the red things in my columns, those are too small, so I'm going to make it six. Ok. So I've got 12 here and I can do the same thing. I can say. Actually I want a mobile NAV along the top, I want my Hero Box and as a designer, I know that uh here, I've got all this extra space on desktop. So I've kind of pushed my Hero box in from the edges. But on mobile, I don't have that luxury. It's too small. So I'm gonna go, my Hero Box is gonna go all the way across here and when I get to my features, OK? Which is these three boxes here? Ok. I'm gonna say actually three across is gonna make them too small. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to either stack them up on top of each other or maybe let's say that over here on desktop, I'm actually gonna have four of them and where we go, here we go. I'm gonna have four of them. So that when I'm working on mobile, I can have rectangle two. I might just have two across, make two of these, selecting them all. I'm doing my kind of holding option on a Mac on PC and you can see I've got that exact same content, my four feature boxes but laid out nicely on mobile. That's maybe a bit more, you know, I have to test it to see how big the text is and the images are. OK? I can that's why 12 is useful. It's kind of divisible across mobile. You might be designing for tablet as well and desktop. Now, we haven't covered this specifically, but I wanted to show you something here. This website here, I just picked a random website. Hubspot is just a, if you're searching for stuff about UX and U I and testing, you'll probably end up at hubspot. Eventually. It's some really good resources in here. I like it. But let's say you are the designer for this website. OK? You've designed a website version but watch what happens when I make it smaller. OK? So this is kind of like the big uh big screen, OK? You want to get down to a smaller screen. Can you see what happens? Oop? OK. So some changes happen uh in this case, just the illustration when I get down even smaller, let's say to tablet, OK, they get rid of the menu and go to this kind of more traditional NAV sandwich or burger menu. And then when I get even smaller things change again and kind of lay out for a mobile phone. So this is what you're doing here. You are designing a desktop version. You should be designing a tablet version as well and a mobile version. OK? What all these things look like across the different devices and the developer, OK? The person doing the coding will go OK. I'm making a hair box and on desktop, it's gonna be tucked in two rows only on 10 when it gets to mobile, it's actually gonna be full 12. Ok. It's called responsive design. There's all sorts of fun things with breakpoints and CS S and some of you are going to have some information and knowledge about it. And when I say breakpoints and CS S, you're gonna be nodding sagely and some of you are going to be, it's going to be really foreign to you. My advice is you don't have to be a coder to be a UX designer, but it's really helpful if you understand a little bit of what the developer or web designer is gonna do afterwards. Are they using a framework? What is the framework? Uh Does it use a 12 column grid? What is the default spacing? What is a breakpoint? What's a media query? All those sorts of things are quite useful. You don't have to. But I know that are, they're really helpful when I'm design something I give it to the developer and they don't hit me with their shoe because I've designed something terribly hard to make. So if you do want to go into something like that, even if you don't get into it full time, check out, you might check out anybody's course youtube, whatever you wanna do. Um But if you did to check out one of my courses, probably responsive web design. Um is a really good one. Go check that out. It'll get you up to speed with a lot of this responsive design. Anyway, let's talk about some of the bits I skipped over quite quickly. So desktop homepage went to the columns here. 12. We know why we're using that. Ok. The other part is the margin. What does the margin do? It's the sides. So, if I go 80 OK, what's gonna happen is there's 80 from the outside the margin. I'm gonna delete these guys, I'll cut them. So obviously you need to put in your margins and columns first before you start designing. OK? So I've put in some edges here. Let's say that I'm designing a website and I want to actually design it for a really big size. OK? Hold an option on a Mac or on a PC to get both sides to squidge out. OK? So I'm designing a lot wider site. What I can do is put in nice big margins say like 300 OK? Because what you'll notice is on most websites, OK? Like this hubspot. One's a good example when it gets to my giant four K uh LG monitor screen, what they don't want is they don't want the logo all the way over here and this about and sign up page all the way over here like it just gets too wide, you know, those big wrap around surround screens, it would just get ridiculous. So what we do is we put in margins from the outside OK? So that we, you can see the actual website is actually just in this chunk in the middle here. This stuff here is just placeholder stuff. OK? So that's what you can do here. You can put it in a margin and it could just be background color, but you start your logo here. Keep the website within this, OK? And these are bit stretched depending on how big the screen is. So I'm gonna undo that because that's not what I want. So I'm gonna stay with when I say 14, I mean the 1440 width. OK. There it is there. Let's talk about the gutter. The gutter is the space between columns. How big should those be? There's no official police requirement rule. OK? But it's really common to use 24. OK. 24 is a common thing in development as well. OK? It's easily divisible by 88 is a really good kind of baseline grid number. We'll look at that when we kind of mock up an app in a sec or at least do the grid. OK? But you could pick 30 you could pick 13 again, 13 is not an easily divisible number and that becomes quite important later on when we're kind of coding the website. So 24 is a nice spacing. Anything else I want to share with you before we do the grid? One last thing is even though I said 12 was great. OK, both mobile and desktop. It's a bit weird here. There's just too many columns. Ok? And the spacing is not big enough, it'd be really common. OK? Even though the underlying technology or code will be using kind of 12 columns, potentially. OK. It's often just click on the actual frame and say actually 12 columns is too much. I'm gonna use six, it's visible by eight and it just gives me a bit more spacing in terms of the gutter. I'm probably gonna use something like 16 to space it out, which is one eam. If you're a web designer, it's a common one to use on mobile devices. OK? I'm going to use this for my layout. Even though I said use 12. When I'm designing, it's just easier to use six and assume 12 is going to happen later on, but it's easy. Six goes into 12 twice. Now, the other thing I wanna show you before your brain melts, it's probably already melted. I'm gonna add like an app. OK? Version. We're not designing an app. We're designing a mobile website, but let's say you are designing an app. It'd be very common to not use columns anymore. So I'm gonna use iphone eight. It'd be very common to say I want a layout grid. Oh Click on the plus there it is not of 10. It's really common to use eight. OK? Uh That is a framework that somebody like Android and I Os use for spacing again, it's easy to divisible and it spaces things out nicely. That would be very common talk to the developer who's making it first. They might say otherwise, but a is a really good grid size and you don't use columns in this case because it's not going to respond. It's always gonna be on a phone. OK? We don't need the app right now. Goodbye. Gonna go back to my desktop. Hi Fi and I guess I just want if you get nothing else out of this video, ok? Just know that it's good to have 12 columns to design for. I guess I throw this in there because there's gonna be a few of you out there that have a lot of knowledge and some with a little bit of knowledge of the other part of this process is the web development process and some of those numbers will ring a bell. All right. And last thing before we go shortcut, there'll be a new shortcut sheep because it's a weird one on Mac to turn this on and off because when I preview this look, it doesn't actually appear, it's just there in um working mode to help me, but it doesn't actually get produced at the end. So you end up toggling it on and off quite a bit. So control G on a Mac now, not command G, it's control G which is a weird shortcut, right? It gets even weirder for PC. It's control shift four completely different. Those will be in your shortcut sheet anyway. Oh. Did that feel like the end? It was the end? Uh, I've come back to rerecord something. Um, let's, I want you to actually create four pages and I want to show you a little trick or tip and I'm throwing them with columns. Ok. So if I've got, let's say that I've got a couple of different frames, I'm gonna add another desktop version. OK? And how do I, I've spent some time getting all the columns right on this. OK? There's a weird thing you can do in fig A. So let's click on this. A lot of these things can be selected by clicking the gray kind of area next to them. Look just kind of there, not there because that opens that, but this kind of area. No man's land, there's some, there's some places where you can click. Same with this one. Oh Can I get that one near the fill? Not all of them are clickable but this one here. OK? In that little gap there, I've kind of got it selected so I can copy it, go to there and just, I'm using my command C command V on a Mac that's control C control V on a PC. So I just click on that and going paste and you can paste a lot of that stuff. OK? So that's one way of doing it or you can just go through and start duplicating it like this command D control D on a PC. So I've got three of them. I'm going to fast forward name these. All right. So I want you to do that same thing, have four of them do the same thing for mobile and I will see you in the next video we don't need this. Alright. Do fast forward moves. So you know what I'm doing? All right. So that who remembers how to get it all on the screen in one go you remember shift one. There you go. That's what I want you to build both uh for mobile and desktop and I will see you in the next video.