The Figma interface

Figma looks busy the first time you open it. It is really only four regions, and you can ignore most of each one for the first few weeks.

The four regions: toolbar (top), layers (left), canvas (centre), properties (right).

1. Open a new design file. From the Figma home screen, click + Design file. You get an empty canvas — an infinite one, which is the point.

2. Find the toolbar. Top-left holds the tools you switch between: move, frame, shape, pen, text, comment. Everything here has a single-key shortcut, which is why professionals rarely click it.

   

   Learn these five keys and you can stop visiting this toolbar: V, F, R, P, T.

3. Look at the left panel. Two tabs: Layers (everything in the current page, nested) and Assets (components you can reuse). You will live in Layers.

4. Look at the right panel. This is context-sensitive — it shows properties for whatever is selected. Select nothing and it shows page settings instead. If the panel looks wrong, check what you have selected.

5. Pan and zoom. Space-drag pans. Scroll zooms. ⇧ 1 fits everything on screen, which is the fastest way to recover when you get lost.

Shortcuts worth learning today

Navigation and tools

macOSWindows

Move tool	VV
Frame tool	FF
Rectangle	RR
Text	TT
Zoom to fit	⇧+1Shift+1
Zoom to selection	⇧+2Shift+2
Pan	Space+DragSpace+Drag
Show/hide UI	⌘+.Ctrl+.

Tip

Press ⌃+⇧+?Ctrl+Shift+? at any time to open Figma’s own shortcut panel. It highlights keys as you use them, which is a surprisingly effective way to learn.

Frames are not artboards

If you have used other design tools, you may expect “artboards” — fixed canvases you draw inside. Figma has frames, which look similar but are recursive: a frame can contain frames, and any frame can be resized, nested or turned into a component.

This matters more than it sounds. Almost everything you will learn later — Auto Layout, components, responsive resizing — is a property of frames.

Check your understanding

2 questions · self-check, not graded

1You select a rectangle and the right panel shows different options than when you selected a text layer. Why?

AFigma is loading and the panel has not refreshedBThe right panel is context-sensitive and shows properties for the current selectionCYou are in the wrong file modeDRectangles and text cannot be edited in the same file

2What makes a Figma frame different from a traditional artboard?

AFrames can only hold imagesBFrames cannot be resized once createdCFrames can be nested inside other frames and carry layout behaviourDThere is no difference, it is just a different name