Figma Tips for Mastering the Left Panel and Boosting Productivity

Unlock Your Figma Potential: Expert Tips for Leveraging the Left Panel in Your Design Workflow

Using Figma is more fun when you know it well. It is true that Just knowing the tools isn’t enough to get a UX design job. But being good with this design tool can give you a big plus. This is because you’ll work faster, saving time that you can use for other important UX and UI design tasks.

Last month, I wrote about how to use the right panel in Figma. This time, I want to talk about the left panel. Even though the left panel seems simple, there’s more to it than you might think. It has lots of helpful features that can make your work easier. Let’s start.

The icons in the tree

Have you ever thought about the icons on the tree? Here’s an image with all of them to help you know what each one means.

The icons in the tree

Change the names of multiple layers in bulk action

You can change all the names of the layers one by one or change them in bulk.

Select all of them, hit CMD+R (CTRL+R on Windows), and a modal will open. Then you can type the name you want, and all will change.

The modal has many options like changing all the names, changing part of the name, and also numbering the screens, which is very useful for this case:

Imagine this: you’re working on a flow with many screens and want to number them so each number is the next step, for example, a login flow. First, the user adds the username, then the password, and then clicks the login button.

If you want to number them, select all, click CMD+R, click the number button, and hit Rename. Figma will and the numbers one after the other.

You should be aware that the order will be the same as in the tree, not the order on the canvas.