Member-only story

Why designers should move from px to rem (and how to do that in Figma)

Christine Vallaure
UX Collective
Published in
13 min readNov 5, 2021

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Figma now supports REM. Find the updated version here:

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Jump the paywall, same article via moonlearning.io/articles

If you are anything like me, you happily used Pixel (px) in Sketch and Figma during the past years without thinking much about it. It is the unit they gave me. Surely it is correct, and if not, the development team can fix that, no? Plus, there are a lot of people saying my design should be pixel perfect, right?

Not quite (unless you interpreted “pixel perfect” as avoiding half-pixel). Let’s get started:

So What Is the Problem When Using PX Values?

Pixel in design software (e.g. in Figma) are absolute units, meaning, that 1px corresponds to a defined size (later this will be translated to different screen resolutions but…

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Written by Christine Vallaure

Founder of moonlearning.io | Speaker | Author of thesolo.io, a guide to Solopreneurship (coming soon). LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/christinevallaure

Responses (58)

That looks like the single place where rem/em units are actual for designers is at style guides. The rest of the article is more developer-related.
Actually, what this article says that designers will still design in pixels, just developers need to translate px to rem/em :)

Pixel are absolute units, meaning, that 1px corresponds to a fixed physical size(depending on different screen resolutions).

I believe that it's important to know that a CSS px does not mean pixel. And what's even more important- it's not an absolute value.

Very nice article. You really covered a lot of ground and talked about the subject in a way that designers will understand.
But just to clarify and add a bit more to the explanation: a real pixel doesn't have an absolute physical size. Pixels on tvs…