05. Shapes - Figma 101

In this lesson, we'll take a look at creating shapes inside of Figma. (bright subtle music) Shapes can be used for visual elements, they can define layouts, and they can add structure and dimension to your designs. Let's take a look at one of the most versatile shapes, the rectangle. We're gonna place a rectangle on the canvas by hitting the R-key. There's also a tool for this in the toolbar, but like I mentioned, I never use that.

We can click on the canvas to quickly place a 100 by 100 rectangle, or we can draw a custom size by clicking and dragging. Either method is fine, because we'll ultimately dial in the size using the Properties Panel. With our shape selected, let's change the width and the height to 24 by 24. This is a pretty common size for icons in interface design. We can constrain the proportions by toggling this chain link icon on or off.

This way, we only have to enter one value. In addition to typing a number, we can also nudge the value up or down, one number at a time, by hitting the up or down arrow key on our keyboard. If we hold Shift while nudging this value with the arrow keys, it will adjust in increments of 10. We can also perform the same nudge adjustments directly on the shape while it's on the canvas. With the object selected, we can hold Command, plus the up or down arrow key to adjust the height.

We can also hold Command plus the left or right arrow key to adjust the width. The same Shift-nudge combination works here as well. Hold Command plus Shift, plus any arrow key to adjust the shape and increments of 10. Now, this doesn't only work for shapes, you can also use these same dimension-adjusting techniques for frames, text fields, and anything that is sitting on the canvas. We can rotate this shape or any object on the canvas for that matter, by hovering near the corner and clicking and dragging.

This will adjust the rotation property and just like the dimensions, this can be manually entered as well. If you hold Shift, you can constrain the rotation of increments to 15 degrees while you rotate it. We can also add corner radius to this shape. If we're zoomed in close enough and we hover over the shape, we can see the corner radius circles in the corners. We can click and drag these into the center of the shape to add corner radius, and if we hold Option and drag, this allows us to move a single corner radius at a time.

You can see in the Properties Panel that the corner radius is changing. There's also a corner-smoothing option, and if you click iOS, the smoothing will be set to 60%, which emulates the corner radius found in various iOS interface elements, like app icons, buttons, et cetera. A lot of times, we can use a rectangle instead of a circle, because we can max out the corner radius to create that circle, while also maintaining the ability to change it back later if we'd like, whereas if you use a circle, then you only have a circle. Let's leave these at zero for now, but make a mental note that all of these features exist here. Now that we've got our rectangle on the canvas, let's make some adjustments to turn it into a little play icon.

Now, we're gonna do something a little different and edit this shape's path by either double-clicking the shape or hitting Return with the shape selected. Now you can see the points in each corner, and if we hover over the path in between any two points, we can see a suggestion from the cursor to add a point. Let's go ahead and add a point on the center of the right path by hovering and clicking. Now we're gonna change the cursor to the Pin Tool by hitting the P-key. This is the go-to tool for any path manipulation.

The default behavior of the Pin Tool is to add points to a path, but if we hold Option while hovering at any point, we can click to remove that point. Another way to remove a point is by either selecting the point or drawing a selection around the point that we want to remove, and then hit Shift-Delete. This keeps the full path intact. If we only hit Delete, we will create an open path, which is just a line and it can't have a fill. A line can only have a stroke.

We can add points, remove points, and adjust these points to have curves, also known as Bezier curves, named after the French mathematician, Pierre Bezier, in the 1960s. I know this is a lot of information about adjusting shapes, but with time and practice, it will become second nature. There are a few other shapes located in the Shape Toolbar, and each have their own properties that you can play with in the Properties Panel, and I would encourage you to explore them. So because we've edited this rectangle, we no longer have corner radius circles that let us pull a specific corner radius directly on the canvas, but we can still apply a radius to all of the corners in the Properties Panel. We can also select a single point while in Path Edit Mode and apply a corner radius to only that point.

When you haven't directly manipulated a path on a rectangle, there are additional options you can use for stroke properties, which resemble the way CSS handles adding borders on the web. You can add a stroke to an entire shape or to only one side. You can further customize how a stroke appears by adding custom amounts for each side. There are also a number of effects you can play around with, like Inner Shadow, Drop Shadow, Layer Blur, and Background Blur. To get Background Blur to work, you'll need to adjust the fill opacity of your shape, and make sure it's on top of the other objects in your Layers Panel.

There are also Fill and Stroke properties that you can experiment with while you're digging into different shapes. Lines have their own unique properties as well. If we hit the L-key, we can draw a line on the canvas, adjust the stroke color, the stroke size, and change the end caps. At any point, we can add a fill or a stroke to a shape by hitting the plus icon, and we can disable it by toggling the eyeball icon. If we wanna completely remove it, we can click the minus icon.

One key thing to remember, with the exception of path manipulation, that everything we've done to this little rectangle can also be done to a frame. This will become more important as we start to use frames for interface elements in future lessons. By understanding the various types of shapes and their properties, you can create visually-appealing and functional designs. So experiment with different shapes, explore their properties, and use them strategically to enhance your designs.