Was going through some old Figma files and found out my auto layout usage was way off

I was cleaning up my drive last night and stumbled on a project from like 8 months ago. I remember thinking I had auto layout figured out pretty good. But looking back now I see I was padding everything with fixed values instead of using constraints properly. Makes me wonder what other bad habits I've built up without realizing it. Did anyone else have that moment where you looked at your old work and saw how much you were overcomplicating stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

perez.cole15d ago

Oh man I had a buddy who was the exact same way. He spent like three days hand aligning every element in a landing page with pixel perfect numbers instead of just using auto layout. He showed me his file and it was just a nightmare of nested groups and manual spacings. When he finally learned to use constraints properly he said it felt like a weight lifted off his shoulders. Its funny how we make things way harder on ourselves before we know better.

jade61815d ago

@perez.coole your buddy's story is basically my origin story with figma lol. I read somewhere that most designers go through this denial phase where they think manual control equals better design. I used to spend hours tweaking margins pixel by pixel on a simple card component instead of just clicking auto layout once. The worst part was when the client asked for a small text change and everything broke because I had like 15 layers of manual spacing. Now I just slap auto layout on everything and it feels like cheating.