Design Tactics #10 — The ultimate design swipe file
My #1 piece of advice for junior designers
📂 How to create the ultimate design swipe file in Notion
People often ask “What’s one piece of advice you’d give your younger self?”
For me, it’s to start investing in a design swipe file immediately.
My design inspiration database in Notion is one of my most valuable assets. It’s a great way to organize all of the things that inspire me in one place. And I often browse my swipe file before starting to design in Figma.
This video will show you how to create a tagging system that fits your needs (ex: Dashboards, Web Design, Mobile app design, Card UI, Graphic design patterns, etc.).
And it will also show you some powerful Notion features for designers to help you become a database master 💪
How to create the ultimate design swipe file in Notion
💡 7 resources to go from beginner to master of component properties
When you’re working to create a video like “Strategies for component properties”, you have to do a LOT of research…
So I wanted to take a second to curate the best resources I came across while doing my personal deep dive into component props.
❓ When to use component properties vs. variants?
Use component properties when:
👉 You’re customizing elements that are either within or around your component. These could be swapping icons, showing/hiding banners, swapping slot content, etc.
Use variants when:
👉 You’re making visual changes to the component itself (ex: changing colors, adding shadows in a hover state, indicating a disabled state, etc.). This is also necessary in order to use interactive components!
To help, I turned the general rule of thumb into a little visual 👇
A little rule of thumb
P.s. if you want even more on component properties, I also created a little video showing how I would refactor the “Form systems” lesson from Figma Academy.
💥 Random goodness
Portfolio Inspiration:
I came across one of the most enjoyable portfolio pages I’ve ever seen recently. It’s pretty insane what you can create on the internet with WebGL.
Speaking of portfolios…
I have an idea that I’m tossing around in my head and I want to know if you find it interesting or not.
Would you join a ~3 week cohort of people all committing to revamping and launching new portfolios together?
If you’re like me, you continually punt refreshing your website month after month, year after year, etc.
But what if you had a group of people to hold you accountable? Along with some helpful resources and videos? And maybe you threw in ~$100 (just enough to have some skin in the game)?
Let me know 👍/👎
Awesome new Figma plugin:
I’m currently working on a tutorial video for Propstar but it’s too good not to share right away.
How it works:
Propstar takes your component properties and automatically generates a table of all possible instances.
This is great because one of the main drawbacks to component props was that it made it less clear what potential combinations could exist within a component.
Problem solved ✅
Generate all possible instances for your components, including every combination of variants and component properties, all in a tidy labelled table.
A little glimpse into my world
My journey as a creator began by falling in love with the idea of “learning Figma in Figma”.
But I’ve realized since launching Figma Academy that I LOVE the process of trying to build a business online. It’s ridiculously fun and I’ve been blessed to be able to run at that goal with family.
This is that story 👇