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Lesson Info

The Basics Of Type & Fonts In Figma

Hi, everyone. We're actually going to start making things in f now. And what I'm going to do over the next couple of videos is I'm going to introduce things like type in this one. And the next one's going to be like circles and buttons and colors and ah, just the stuff that we need to get going. We're not going to, I'm just going to, you know, touch on them and throughout the course, we'll get deeper and deeper into them rather than trying to like, I don't know, click every button to do with type in this video. We're gonna get all the basics in and when appropriate throughout the course, we'll dive a bit deeper into them. So let's get started in this video. We're gonna look at type and the various quirks in fig M. All right. So let's start off with the type tool. It's this letter T here. If you hover above stuff, can you see it says text and the shortcut is T on my keyboard so I can tap T on my keyboard. I'm not gonna go through all the shortcuts. OK? But if there's one that you're usi...

ng quite a lot hover above it and it should tell you what it is. See, see, see for adding a comment. All right. So we've got two kinds of text boxes. You click once and you can type forever. OK? That is this one here. It is called a auto width box because I know that off by heart. Uh and the other type of box you're gonna create is a click and drag box. OK? So grab the type tool, click and drag it out. OK? Instead of clicking, once we click and drag it, we get this option here, which is the fixed size box. OK? And this one is just means that when I get to the end, it will break. OK? And we'll use both of these in this course, especially for this wireframe. So I'm going to undo uh if you don't know there's edit, undo if you're on the browser version, it is in here, edit undo. OK? And you'll see the shortcut for it there, undo, redo. So we're going to do two things we're going to do uh auto with. OK? So type tool click once and just type in your brand name. OK? So mine is Scott Headphones. OK? And when you finish, you can just kind of like click out in this no man's land. OK? And you can move it around and stuff and grab the type tool again and let's do a box about this sort of size. OK? And we're gonna type in our marketing measure. So, just type in something like this is our marketing message. You've got to be at this stage with things. It depends on who you're working for and it's best to keep everything very generic. Try not to use language, you know, marketing speak here because you might send off to testing and instead of people testing like the flow and they might end up testing, you know, coming back with spelling mistakes or like, ah, it might be controversy about the marketing message. That's not right. Let's get it to copywriting. OK. So at the moment, we're just going to keep everything as simple as we can to take out any sort of variables for our testing just so that we're focused. Now, you can switch these later on. Let's say that this one here, we want to actually make it that auto with. OK. So we can click it here. Same with this one. We can make it a fixed box and the difference now is watch this when I start typing. OK? It kind of blows out of the box and it's got to fix with so you can change them later on. I'm going to hit undo a couple of times. OK? I'm using my shortcut command Z on a Mac control Z on a PC to get back to, hm, undo, aren't as consistent as you would imagine. Um, from other programs undo. Can you see the undo didn't put my rectangle back to the big size. It's undoing my type. Ok. Ok. But it's not doing that. Um, big rectangle. This is pretty common throughout fig. A. Sometimes you can like, draw an arrow, change the arrowhead hit undo and that leaves the arrowhead there. This may change over time, but it's just one of those quirks about fig. A sometimes if you hit undo, it decides not to always do what you ask. It does bits of it. Um So what I've got is I've got it selected with my selection tool. I've made sure it's a kind of fixed size and I'm gonna drag it out. So it's a bit bigger because what I'd like it to do is I'm gonna play around with just the basics here and let's look at font size and the basics over. I'm not gonna cover them all cos you know how to go. Font size is a little drop down. Look at that, go to something nice and big. You might have to select your text first. So double click it, highlight it and say over here, I'm gonna make it nice and big and because it's a fixed box, it's gonna kind of break on the sides here. Uh Left the line centered, you know, all that sort of stuff. One of things I will show you is that let's say things if you hover above them. OK, that little icon there is the line height. OK? But you can click and drag them any of the icons. So I'm gonna undo that I do again. There it goes. OK if you see the little icon. So over here not drag over here on any of these little icons, you can click hold and drag them. So I tend to do this quite a lot. OK? When I'm working and you'll see me throughout the course. OK? Dragging line height and tracking and data spacing and that sort of stuff. So that's one little trick. The other one I do quite a bit is um let's say this is not drag ball. I wish it was ok. But if you click in here and see my little cursor flashing, if I had the arrow key on my keyboard, just the plain old up down, left, right. Use the up in the down. OK. If you hold shift, it goes up in big chunks. OK? In tens units of tens. So that's true of like every box in here if I want the width to be a bit wider up and down, OK? Or hold shift, go up in big chunks and I'm making the width of this text box, bigger undo undo, ring my boxes. OK? But for the fonts, I use it quite a bit, just kind of going up and down. I'm looking at my uh desktop. I'm not really looking over here. I'm just kind of checking. Is this a good font size? Had a good font size. Now, when it comes to fonts here, you, there's a couple of things. We are picking font sizes. Now, um, you've got to be really be at 100% at the moment we're at 86 you might be at 100. But if you're picking font size, you're like, oh, that's too small. You've got to try and pick a font size at 100%. Ok. You don't want to be, you know, trying to pick a font size when you zoom right out because you can make it too big. Um, and this because this is going to be on a mobile device. Ok. It's a mobile website. It's not an app, but it's only going to be viewed through a mobile website at this kind of um kind of ratio this height. Ok. It's best to be actually picking font sizes on your phone. Ok. I'll show you a little bit later in the course. Not too far. We're gonna actually preview everything on a device. Ok. So don't be spending too much time on, you know, deciding who was it? 12? Should it be 16? 14 actually get it onto the device and start looking. All right, the last thing I want to share with you when you are kind of at this font picking stage, especially for a wireframe is I want you to pick a not font, a font that has zero character. I feel bad because this is Roboto. Sorry. Roberto. You have zero character and I don't want, you know, let's not go all brush script. Ok? Or even if it's a beautiful font and it's exciting. Ok. We want really plain fonts here because when we do do our testing, um we want feedback not on like, hey, I don't like that font or that's not communicating, right? We, we don't want to, you know, bring that into the conversation. We want to keep it all separate and just have very, very simple. So it'd be really common to you. Something like Roboto or open sands, you know, let's have a look. Roboto. Open sands. What's another one? Sauce? Sands, sauce. Ok. You can tell these guys are not the guys you invite to the party. Ok. They've got no, they've got little personality. They're clear and they are professional and great for a wireframe, but they're no brush script. So whatever you decide, pick one, we're gonna use Roboto for this because it's, I don't know the most generic of them all. Plus it has a lot of weights that you can play around with often. If you don't have Roboto, you can find it online. Download it. Um It is, yeah, it is pretty common around the place and it is free. You can use aerial or Calibri or whatever you want to use. Actually, you're not allowed to use aerial Calibri. It's too Microsoft. Um All right. So we've picked a non font. We're gonna throw in a few different things for our mock up. So we've got our um for our logo as well. We're just going to keep it super simple. And even if you have, if your company already has a brand, it's probably appropriate to throw it in, in black and white, just keep it simple because the brand isn't being developed yet for this company. Um We're just gonna keep it super simple. I'm going to play around with the fonts now. This is where I break all my own rules like, hey, don't pick a font that has character, stay away from, you know, and then you can't help yourself. You're like, man, that leading is really big. Uh If you want leading to go back to zero, just delete it and hit enter and it goes back to auto. OK? And even then you're like, oh OK. I'm just gonna oh right one, this one here just take it over a little bit. I can't help myself. You uh yeah. Do, as I say, don't do as I do. Don't be playing around with letter spacing and stuff and making it. Your wireframe looks good, making your wireframe look really good. Mm It's hard to stop that. You can do a little bit of design so we need a couple of things. So we're gonna keep that. Um we're gonna copy and paste and use this again. Wow, that went weird. And when you do copy and paste. Did you notice that? So there's only one of them there. Now, if I copy and paste and figment it goes back over the top. So there's two of them right over the top. OK. So that's uh it's a weirdness but hey, it works. We're gonna have a buy now button. Bye. Now, now I end up duplicating. Instead of copying and pasting, you may or may not do this on a Mac. You hold down the option key. You see the little arrow, it's a little double, double arrow there on a PC. It is your option key. So if you do that before you start dragging, so selection tool, hold down that key option or alt drag it out and you get a second one. Fig mat is really good at lining things up. Can you see? Oh, so handy. OK. We've gotta buy now and I learn more. OK? We are going to go centered for that one. I need another one up here. That's gonna be my product shot. I think that's all the texts we're gonna do for this particular mockup. All right. So we will go into a little bit more text detail later on. But uh see this little dotted line down here. This is where you get into the, it's pretty amazing how deep it does go. If you're a designer who loves a bit of loves a bit of loves a bit of ligatures and all sorts of amazing things. You can see alignment. Not that exciting decoration, underlines, strikethroughs nothing. Ok. So there's a lot bullet points are in here. You can start doing uppercase lowercase. I won't cover them all. Ok. We will look at little bits throughout the course, but here's all the, if you really wanna get into stylistic sets and man, it gets deep. So it is most of it's just sitting here in your kind of right menu. They call it the right panel. Sometimes they call it the properties inspector. This thing here on the right. Ok. You can get most of it just here. This little dotted line gets you a bunch more. All right, we've actually made something kind of bunch of boring text. Let's get into the next video and make some, ah, boring rectangles and buttons. I'll see you in the next video.