My story of a cover page for the Figma file
It was 8:40 AM in the morning. I woke up from the bed as my subconscious memory reminded me of the team meeting at 9 AM to discuss what I am working on.
8: 45AM: Turned on my lappy. It takes a heck of a time to get started and have all applications open (along with Figma).
Now it is 8:59 AM.
Flashback
If you are a Figma person and a large team of designers, you know how there are many files for browsing. The reason for this can be — everyone publishes their work for review and files from your draft. Also, files from the community for inspiration. And other design inspirations from the internet, more and more files. So, when it comes to finding that one file from the grid of drafts or projects, it takes a moment or more. Search is available but sure you might not have an interest in going for it always.
I hope, you find a file using the file’s thumbnail snapshot reference that you saved in your brains. The amount of working memory might not be in your favor always. So what’s the solution to find my file that I am looking for at 8:59 AM to start presenting at 9:00 AM meeting.
So, there’s a problem to solve, right?
Figma’s preferred way to show you files is by displaying a snapshot from the file content. You remember it most of the times and that fades by increasing the number of files. You might wonder, why some content-rich websites use a grid pattern to present content?
There is something deep you should be knowing here. See this research document about Restoring the context of interrupted work.
Coming back to my problem. How to find my file with ease? May be by having a good thumbnail for every file that I can remember among the bunch of files. So, how can I achieve it?
From the research I made among my pals who use Figma, most of them said they remember their files by names. They try to recall it in case they need to use a search. So my thought here is to create an awesome file cover that shows up name along with a color of choice.
I thought of creating a plugin that generates a cover page for each file that you work on. Here is where you need to go for getting more info about how to create plugins for Figma. https://www.figma.com/developers. I do have a little programming knowledge, I created it using plugins API made available by Figma. At the end of this article, you can find some links that can help you get started on how to create a Figma plugin.
- Open any file that you are working on.
- Launch the CoverPage plugin.
- Enter the cover page text, select a color, and hit the ‘Create’ button.
- The plugin creates a new page at the start of the pages list for your file that shows up as a cover.
Its simple to use and for now with basic preferences to create a cover. I started using it for myself and did some testing too and now It is ready for the launch. I published my plugin with a good banner along with a write-up. It will take 3–7 business days for the Figma team to review and approve it. You need to wait for an email that says your plugin is either approved or rejected.
Wait…..wait…..wait…..🙇🏻 🙇🏻 🙇🏻♂️️️
and here comes the approval mail and the plugin is live. You can find it here
You might be wondering how this small plugin made the change for me. Here is the before and after the scenario:
I will come up with more ways of customizing the cover in the next version of this plugin. You can find the current version here
Check out this plugin in Figma and let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas around it. Here are some resources to get started if you have an interest in plugin development:
https://blog.prototypr.io/figma-plugin-tutorial-1-6-65fc2102506
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM1HcamgCQ0
https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-make-plugins-for-figma-d29190a64d8a
Thanks a ton.🙏🏼
