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Lesson Info

What Is Autolayout & Expanding Buttons In Figma?

Hi, everyone in this video we're gonna make buttons. You're like we already made buttons. There they are there. Ah, we're gonna make fancy buttons ready? Hey, look how fancy that is. Ok. We're gonna look at something called auto layout. Ok. And it's gonna expand. Look at that gets bigger and smaller. So we're going to do another one that stretches. Ok. It's different. Ok. Uses the same sort of principles, but instead of expanding, we expand the parent outside part and this guy sticks in the middle and that's for no reason other than danger, it's basically another one of these. All right, let's go make some expanding buttons and I'll explain why I'm wearing that shirt that says, hug me. All right. It'll all become clear. Ok? To get started with our, um, stretchy button. Ok. We're going to start with the mechanics of a button. So background rectangle with a bit of texts on top shift to zoom out one. Ok. So I've just got text sitting on top of a rectangle. See them there. Nothing fancy go...

ing on. If I select both of them, we need to turn them into a frame. This is one of those special powers that I talked about earlier that frames have. So any way you want to commit it, convert it into a frame, I'm just right clicking it and saying frame selection. OK? So here we go, there's my frame. I'm going to give it a name just to be clear. OK. I'm going to call this one BT N and this is going to be my button medium. No, this is my small bun. OK? So keep an eye on that structure there. So the next thing you want to do, we've done frames before. It's kind of like grouping. The extra special thing is this auto layout, watch this click this button and now go in here and start typing, start typing. Woohoo. We've got a super stretchy button. OK? So that's what auto layout does. Now a couple of things to be mindful of let's uh change this to per per we're gonna use that button in a sec. OK? The thing that changed is auto layout. You don't have to notice. But can you see this changed that button that was in the background actually disappeared. Where did it go? So there's my um you know, there was that thing that said by now, but where did that little rectangle go? Basically, it got sucked up into the parent frame. And the other thing that happened. So it renamed it good work then button small. OK. The other thing that happened is the icon changed. This is a little pause button. Ok. There's an auto layout icon. So if you're copying and pasting from some other person's document, it's gonna have some magic built into it because it's an auto layout. So it doesn't really matter that the rectangle is gone because it's been smooshed into the sea here. This thing here is got the right color and there's no background layer anymore. Really? Alright. That doesn't really matter right? All you care about is that it's uh stretchy. Ok. So let's look at how to change things like the padding cos we had ours lined up nicely. You might not, you might go actually, I need to bring in the sides and push out the top. Ok. The way to do it though is it's a little strange you've got kind of two parts to this button. There's the child and parent, ok. The parent is the boss, he's on top, ok? And he controls everything inside of it, the child. Ok. The padding is actually controlled by the parent, ok. This parent uh frame here, which is also an auto layout frame. Ok. So you can start to see things over here. Nope. Well, they actually hide it. It's this thing here, alignment and padding. I don't know why it's so small in there. It's quite important. I know when I first started it was kind of tricky to find. So you click the parent, click on this thing and there's the padding. Ok. I'm going to say actually I want it to be eight for the top and bottom. I'm just tapping around and for the sides. I'm going to do 24 either side. All right. That's my kind of sizing. Gonna go to capitals and I'm gonna go back to that purchase. Now, one thing that might not be working if you are having problems with it, that initial, I'm going to copy paste that thing. So this is the original one I started with. Let's change the color of it just because. So this is the one that I started with. If you start here and say actually I'm going to start with a text box that is a fixed size that causes problems because we know from earlier on if we have a fixed size button, it doesn't like where we go and doing. Yeah. So fixed size, it means that I'm going to type and it's gonna break onto other lines. It's breaking down here. It's white text. So if you do that first, that won't work the little stretchy thing. So you just need to make sure that you select all your text, OK? Or select it with the selection tool and say you are this one here. Remember the auto width means auto width just means I keep going. OK? And if you start with that, hey, let's run through it one more time you guys convert to frame, frame selection order layout. Yeah. Alright. So that is that one. So that's the first type of button. This one will automatically get bigger and smaller. I use this one quite a lot. It's the main one that you'll use expanding buttons. The one that you'll use less is that stretchy button we saw at the beginning. So I'm gonna make another one so I'm just going back to like text with uh background rectangle. Ok. We'll change this to the cool. Huh? And let's change the color. So we know what we're doing. There's the rectangle. There it is. You're gonna be that color. So you get started the same way you select both of them. You say you are a frame frame, the selection and you say you're an auto layout. The differences here is to do with the constraints and resizing. OK? By default, it wants to hug contents. Remember that gag? You've seen the t-shirt? OK. And if you're wondering why he was wearing hug contents, dad t-shirt? It is a dad joke, but it's a UX dad joke. OK. So by default, what it wants to do is hug the contents. OK? The parent on the outside wants to hug this inside stuff as close as it can. But listening to the padding, that doesn't make sense. Let's look at his nemesis. OK? So let's look at the we're going to rename this one. Let's call this one button two and we've got, remember our parent and our child. So the child on the inside is how this one works. We say the child, what I'd like you to do is not be hugged by the parent. You're too tight. Parent go away. What I want you to do is for the left and the right, this one, I want you to just to fill the container and you're like, huh? That's done nothing. So, what that means is Mr Parent? Ok, I'm gonna drag him out and look at that. He fills either side all the way to the edges there. That's his job now. So the child will fill it. So it depends on what kind of button you want. Leave it all by default, you get the expanding box. OK? And if you try and drag the side of it to make it bigger, let's grab the side of it even. OK? It doesn't do what you want. Well, it doesn't do what this one does. This one does that this one doesn't do the expanding thing, ok? If you wanted to get expand up and down, are you ready for this? We're going, we're going down another level. You ready a little bit inception? OK. I feel like I've given you too much but you're gonna go. Why isn't that going that way? We've done left and right. Do I just go in here instead of saying? So remember it's the stretchy buttons. You have to do it with the child. Here you go. OK. We say, stop hugging me, I'll fill the container and you go, OK, we'll just do it at the top and the bottom as well. You can say, ok, fill the container and then you go. It's still not works. It kind of working the text box in here. Let's have a look. If I be right back, the actual text box is actually filling the container. That's his job. Look, he's doing exactly what we told him to do. The problem is, is this text is aligned at the top so you can go over here and say uh the default is aligned up. You just say align center. So now we've got this kind of like stretchy thing. Um I show you this cos you're gonna get other people's buttons and you're gonna be not freaked out, but you're gonna be like this is amazing. Why didn't Dan show me how to do stretchy buttons as well? Basic one super easy, make it a frame, make it auto layout, adjust the padding as necessary. This one here make a frame, make auto layout, but then deal with the child and say fill container, please fill container and you might actually for the up and down have to adjust the text box itself to the center. Now we're going to go one step level down this inception wormhole. We're going to do one more. OK? I just because we have to, I'm going to change this. We're going to cut this calling, cutting to the chase. We're making a clumsy button. We're taking a long time to do it often. What I'll do is let's just actually pin that. Let's grab some text. Let's type it out. Let's call this our more button. Ok? You don't need to draw a rectangle in the background because we know that if you do, like if you do just take a rectangle first with text and you turn it into a frame and then you click auto layout. It turns, it gets rid of my rectangle already. So we can cut to the chase. Watch this, grab the text right, click it, frame selection, auto layout. We've still got that strange structure. There you go. OK without the box. But we can say you the frame here is give you a background color. Let's give him some round the corners and the padding. Where do they hide that padding? It's in there there it is. We can say actually give me eight top and bottom and 24 side by side. I don't know. How do you feel? Just draw the rectangle or turn your text into a frame start that way and just color it and style it. The chicken works. There's definitely a danger button red is danger. All right. That is it for auto layout. It is pretty amazing. It's one of the perks for frames and we are slowly learning what constraints are. There's more to constraints, but we've done the basics we looked at hugging because by default, at this initial first one, the contents gets hugged as tightly as it can while acknowledging your padding. And then we learned a stretchy one. And then tan told us how we didn't need a rectangle. Oh, have I made it easier or harder? Well, I don't know. That's what you're getting. I will see you in the next video.