Unpopular opinion: Figma auto-layout isn't always faster than doing it by hand

I spent 6 months forcing auto-layout on everything at my last job and ended up redoing half the file because the margins got too tangled... Has anyone else found certain layouts are just quicker to manually space out?

2 comments

2 Comments

evand655d agoMost Upvoted

Was this more about complex nested components or just basic button/input spacing? Trying to figure out if the tool itself or the use case was the bottleneck.

barbara_moore735d ago

Did you catch that Smashing Magazine article about this exact thing? They tested a bunch of forms and found nested components were way more of a headache than simple spacing. Spacing is mostly just CSS margins and padding, easy to fix. But nested components? That's where everything falls apart. You end up fighting with frameworks and weird layout bugs. The tool itself is fine for simple stuff. But when you layer components inside components inside components, that's when you start pulling your hair out.