This is a YouTube video titled "Figma 101 – Using Shapes (5 of 12) Lesson Preview" containing an instructional lesson on using shapes in Figma, specifically focusing on creating and adjusting rectangles for design purposes. The content is a single-speaker tutorial explaining tools and techniques for interface design, published in May 2024.
In this lesson, we'll take a look at creating shapes inside of Figma. Shapes can be used for visual elements, they can define layouts, and they can add structure and dimension to your designs. Let's take a look at one of the most versatile shapes, the Rectangle we're going to place a rectangle on the canvas by hitting the R key. There's also a tool for this in the toolbar, but like I mentioned, I never use that. We can click on the canvas to Quickly place a 100 by 100 rectangle, or we can draw a custom size by clicking and dragging. Either method is fine because we'll ultimately dial in the size using the Properties panel. With our shape selected, let's change the width and the height to 24 by 24. This is a pretty common size for icons in interface design. We can constrain the proportions by toggling this chain link icon on or off. This way, we only have to enter one value. In addition to typing a number, we can also nudge the value up or down one number at a time by hitting the up or down arrow key on our keyboard. If we hold Shift while nudging this value with the arrow keys, it will adjust in increments of 10. We can also perform the same nudge adjustments directly on it.
