I was playing around a little with Figma lately & realised making components has become easier than ever was. In my previous episode I wrote about changing the frame name in order to create components but now with latest upgrade making components has become so much easier.

In this episode we will discuss how to create buttons, create components and further use them in your app. Currently I am designing for Vah Vah! App, so I will be focusing on mobile dimensions.

Why am I Creating assets for my app first compared to website or any other platform?

Most of our students use the app on a daily basis. There is more complexity in the app and it is customer facing. This will have the highest impact and hence we went ahead and started with the app.

For our reference of learning I am going to try and limit this to Primary, Secondary & Tertiary buttons

My simple buttons

Auto Layout

In order to Maintain Perfect consistency it is useful that you define how you want your button to look like on your device

First way is to define the exact width and height and adding text in which I have done with my Primary and secondary buttons

Other way is by adding auto-layout, which is my favourite thing when things are dynamic in nature. I will show how this works using a real life example from our current app.

real time example from our appHow to Auto-Layout

Auto-layout makes things quite simple. You can also use this for creating Auto-layouts between Multiple components, and define spacing between components eg: spacing between Heading → subheading → paragraph, or even buttons. Once you Auto Layout, Any changes made will automatically adjust your frame according to your space definition

Figma Auto Layout for Multiple components

Now that we perfected the Auto-Layout between items let’s dive into how to create these components.

How to Easily Create Component variants

Creating variants of button

1. First start by creating all your button types — your primary, secondary and tertiary, You can even add buttons with icons.
2. Select All Frames → Click Component Options on top nav → Select Create Multiple components
   With this you will have defined your button components you want to use.
3. Now you want to make sure they are grouped to one family,
   Select all the components → Click on combine as variants
   eg: Primary, secondary & tertiary are variants of button.

Thats it define names according to your naming convention and tadaa you have your Buttons for your app.

Now to test out your button you can go to your assets and drag and drop a button and choose the variant you want.

I have similarly made some of my icons, video components for my App.

I further used these components to make multiple other components to use in my video segment which will be easy to maintain since I made components

Once making these components make sure of the changes being made, since any changes made to these original components will be reflected in all the copies you make as well. Hence try and copy paste these components and then make changes you need to it. so your Source of truth remains intact.

Finally I will publish and use them in my app. Which we will go ahead and do in the next episode.

Hope you enjoyed this. Have fun making your very own design system.

However If you are just starting off though don’t limit yourself worrying about a design system just yet.

TIP: There are several design system components already out there in the community so go ahead and check them out as well.

If you missed the episode 1 you can check it out by clicking here