Organising Your Figma Pages using Hierarchical Header Components

Organising your Figma Files well is a crucial aspect of your Design Handoff, especially when you do not use extra tools like Zeplin or Storybook (common in a lot of startups) Just like your product, your Design Files also has customers. They are your Developers and Project Managers. Properly organised Figma Files keep your Devs & PMs happy which leads to a happy team. A happy team leads to a happy product, resulting in happier customers. And what does that get us? Praise and revenue. Both are extremely valuable to your company. Let’s take a look at how you can organise your Figma Frames through Header Components Let’s explore the anatomy of our header:

Some Ponits to keep in mind

1. The Base Layer I would suggest you to fill the base with one of your brand colours. It is better to stick to your branding palette to make sure the entire vibe of your Design Files represents your Brand Identity. I've applied one of my colour styles on the base. The base has Horizontal Constraints (HC) set to 'Left & Right' and Vertical Constraints (VC) set to 'Top & Bottom'. This is to make sure I can stretch my header frame in any way without breaking the design.

2. Gradient Layer Now to add some extra flair, I've also add another rectangle with a dark linear ramp on top of it. Do not add the gradient directly on your Base Layer. You'll understand why I've added two separate layers for the Header fill in a while 😏

3. Branding (Optional) If needed, you can design a branded PNG overlay or simply put your logo on the right side of the header. It should be something really subtle. A quick hack is to set the blend mode of your logo/branding PNG to “Overlay” instead of “Pass Through” from the Image Properties Panel. Things look better with an opacity of 20% at Overlay. You don't want your branding PNG to compete for extra attention.

4. Text Labels for setting Context I always keep two text labels. The first one gives a broader view and the second one gives the specific context for the frames placed next to it. I've added both these texts into an Auto-Layout and set the auto-layout's HC to Left and VC to Centre. With this, we are finally done designing our header. Make sure you make a component of this and publish it. This would allow you to have access to this component in all your project files. If you ever decide to change anything, once single change would trickle down to all your headers in a click.