Although I have nothing against trends itself, the worst thing that a designer or a product owner can do, is to copy eve

If you’ve used the no-code website builder Webflow, this will no doubt seem familiar to you. It’s a visual way of understanding the Flexbox layout model and makes it far easier to look at and intuitively grok.

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That’s what having a little buddy, a dog or a cat, does to a person — tons of research proves that. Want to be happier? Get a pet, not just a shrink. But the lesson is profound. We are alienated things, living in our shining towers of glass and steel, in our concrete cities and suburbs. We’re deeply unhappy as a civilization, and it shows in everything we do. In our addiction to anti-depressants — can you think of another species like that? — in our constant need for dumb, violent escapism, in our endless wars, in our susceptibility to superstition, in our need for the acquisition of shiny things to fill the gaping hole in our lives.

This is amazing! Previously, this was only hackable using ‘spacer elements,’ which muddied up your layout with unnecessary shapes. And it even then, using spacers would only allow you to introduce padding in one direction, without nesting frames.

An aside: Flexbox isn’t the only layout model there is. It’s one of a few ways of laying out content in CSS. Many web developers are preferring to use something newer called CSS Grid, although it has less browser support. These both make use of the CSS box-model, where all elements have a content edge, padding edge, border edge, and margin edge.

Responsive design and having a mobile-first approach are concepts that have been heralded for years, but until now it’s primarily been a responsibility for developers. Designers have just had to create layouts on a canvas, making multiple versions to try and cover the most popular devices, and then let developers interpret and implement those layouts.

But it empowers designers to understand the destination their designs are heading for. It makes iterating within constraints faster. And, hopefully, it eases the conversations between designers and developers.

In the example above, you can see how a frame with two subheadings and five rows is edited to have indents and space-above, meaning that it’s much easier to introduce whitespace to your designs and allow them to breathe, while benefiting from Auto Layout, without cluttering your file.

Landing page is a popular, yet quite specific kind of website. It often makes me wonder, why it is so hard these days, to find a landing page that is done well? It would seem that we, as product designers, owners and users, are design-aware enough (compared to 10 years ago) — yet there’s one simple thing that everyone seems to forget:

Let’s look at the above example. The text section of the podcast card previously could only be set to auto-width or fixed-width, OR auto-height / fixed-height, depending on whether the frame had horizontal or vertical Auto Layout.

(There’s also something called Auto Layout for iOS apps, which dynamically arranges Views hierarchically. But this is totally unrelated to Figma’s Auto Layout, which is based on Flexbox and the CSS box-model.)

Knowing that, we should design landing pages with a very strict list of goals in mind. It’s not a beauty or creativity competition. The page should be distinctive, yet not overwhelming. The message should be straight and to the point. The overall visual style should match the product’s characteristics. It should also be appealing to the target group. The shopping experience itself should be as quick, as easy and delightful as possible.

PS: If you’re reading this before Friday 20th November 2020, you still have time to sign up for the free Auto Layout Office Hours event, and ask the team any questions you may have.

Now, you can set a frame with Auto Layout to fill its parent container, even if the frame is a vertical stack and the parent container is scaled horizontally. It just works.

Auto Layout is an absolute pain-remover. It solves so many issues and allows me to make way more generic components with basic controls, instead of new components for variations in content.