Text Styling in Figma
Recently, I made a DataViz on Goku, the protagonist of The Dragon Ball manga & anime series where I designed the text and customized the aspects of the typeface in Figma, for the viz and saga titles.
And after so much procrastination, I finally, wrote this blog and wanted to share how simple drop shadows and little tweaks here and there will make your text go…
Both the text are written from the same font, which is used to write the official logo of the Dragon Ball Franchise called Saiyan Sans.
I wanted the title of my viz to look more like the official logo text and I was glad to find that this font existed for public use but only writing a simple text field wasn’t what I wanted it to look like.
I wanted to edit the text and mould it in different ways and that thing is only possible after converting your element into vector paths.
Converting an element into a vector path allows us to twist and turn it in whichever way we want just as we do to make different irregular shapes/blobs in Figma. You can convert any shape into a vector path by double-clicking on it and editing but this is not applicable to text fields, now the question was how to turn a text field into a vector path…?🤯
After google-ing for an hour or so I came across a blog by Figma itself which said “Convert text to vector path”. Exactly what I needed!🤩 I came to know about a feature called ‘Flatten’ which you can find by right-clicking the text layer.
This is where the real fun starts!…although remember that once you flatten a text layer it cannot be unflattened, Figma doesn’t have this feature yet (believing they would bring in the future!), ctrl+Z (windows)/comm+Z (MacOS) are the only options to undo.
Once you flatten the text, every single alphabet converts into a vector shape and it will look something like this:
The dots are proof that your text element has turned into a vector path and now you can play with it, mould it in any way you want by pulling and relocating the dots and all the properties will also remain intact! You can also find my step-by-step guide to text styling in Figma resource file here.
If you have not worked with vectors before, it might take some time to get comfortable editing a vector path especially when it’s a text but after some practice, you will be good to go and you will be able to create wordmarks, headers and titles just like you wish!!
This feature turned out to be a game-changer, and except for the general styling, tweaking the typeface itself gave the wordmarks a different feel. It also turned out to be fun and I kept designing all the texts that I needed for my viz till 3 at midnight!!😁
All the above wordmarks are made in Figma itself. If you want to try this feature, you can find my step-by-step guide to text styling in Figma resource file here.
I hope the article and the resource file will help you, connect with me and do tag me if you use the file, on Twitter & LinkedIn!
Also, find me on:
Figma | Tableau | Behance | Dribbble | Instagram
Thank you!❤
