Random frames defaulting to Absolute Position when applying Auto-Layout

Thank you all for the feedback. I’ve passed it along to our internal team. While I can’t promise a fix, the product team will look into it. I’ll let you know as soon as there are any updates.

Thanks for your patience!
Toku

As a designer managing systems for multiple design teams at an enterprise company, these small changes like applying absolute positioning when an AL property is applied or changed is costing us literal thousands of dollars in lost efficiency.

This is a bug, not an enhancement or feature. We have developed our design systems with Figma’s support and this behavior was not present in previous iterations of the software. PLEASE fix this bug ASAP. We cannot keep resetting components when absolute positioning is auto-applied.

I’ve noticed this same issue after updating my desktop app. Relatively new Figma user, so I wasn’t sure what the brackets around the layer icon in the layers panel meant at first. Absolute positioning seems to happen on component instances at random and there’s no way to remove it. I’ve had to go fiddle with my main component to fix it (even though it had NO absolute positioning to begin with.)

@Jim_Jordan @SomethingFishy

Thanks for the details. I’ve shared your feedback with internal teams again. Sorry for the confusion. I’ll let you know as soon as there are any updates.

Thanks,
Toku

Indeed, the issue is especially frustrating when it comes to elements inside component instances being overridden. It broke my layouts without me even noticing, because I rely on components for this specific reason: to be able to manage one instance rather than 30 instances. I honestly thought it was a bug and was waiting for it to be fixed, and I am surprised to know it was intentional.

In my experiments with this, there are times when it makes sense and works as expected when creating a new AL and some outlier object not in a hint of a column or row with the other objects is then placed as an absolute positioned object. The current placement of the objects influences the assumed layout structure it should take when applied, horizontal, vertical, or wrap. While there are initially elements of that placement logic that make sense but it seems—also from what others have said—that placing the desired objects into the auto layout is the preferred action and not to have outliers become absolute positions. My work flow consists of building things into auto layout frames, not building it on a normal frame where everything is essentially absolute positioned and then selecting and putting things into auto layouts hoping that certain things are clearly outside of a conventional row/column format to be absolute positioned instead. In my early days of Figma, auto layout was hard to understand and build in, there was a bit of a learning curve as I wasn’t accustomed to thinking of objects in specific groups with specific spacial relationships. But pretty quickly, once familiar with auto layout, it become the easy way to build things to make sure the spacing follows our desired patterns and to keep layering simple. If I’m going to add a nice tag that hangs off the corner of my card, I’m going to manually absolute position it because that makes sense, it is the exception to the rule of the card, that everything is in a column or row.

What baffles me is that there will be items inside of multiple auto layout layers of an AL object and when this object is put in a new AL, suddenly a random item three layers deep in the AL layers of these objects randomly sets to absolute position! Something like this has been happening almost every time I am putting components or non component objects into new auto layouts.

For example I have a several cards that each have three auto layout rows with text, buttons, images, etc in the rows respectively. These auto layout rows are in a vertical AL to build the card. I took several of these cards and put them in a new horizontal AL together to make a carousel and these small frames (with invisible content), inside a horizontal AL, inside the vertical AL of the card suddenly all decided to absolute position. It happened a second time when I took three of these carousel rows and put them in a vertical AL together, the same little frame at the top left switched to absolute position. Just for context, there is a parallel frame on the top right in the row with the avatar and this row is laid out this way because content appears on hover. I’ve had other examples with content clearly visible change it’s AL position multiple layers deep, so while I think there can be an influence from the apparent emptiness of a layer influencing its chance to become absolute positioned within it’s AL when an exterior AL is applied/added, I don’t think it is the only factor.

Not to mention how frustrating it is to take component instances and to put them in an AL together, with the intent of building a bigger component, and seemingly random frames multiple layers inside this component (possibly in a separate smaller component itself!) become absolute positioned after a new exterior AL is applied. I have to click into the component and “Reset All Changes”, removing any intentional changes made, of that instance in order to fix it as I can’t remove the absolute position of the specific frame inside of a component instance.

Hi everyone here!

Want to support this topic. I was very surprised and frustrated when, at some point, I discovered that in some components of our large design system, some hidden elements suddenly got absolute positioning. And I didn’t even know about it! Because before, I would just add AutoLayout to a group/frame, and everything worked as expected. But now, absolute positioning is RANDOMLY applied to elements within the group. For example, in a group, I have three elements: one visible and two hidden. If I add AutoLayout to the group, absolute positioning is applied either to the visible element or to the hidden ones. This is unfortunately not very user-friendly. It’s very annoying and forces me to take a lot of unnecessary steps. Plus, now you constantly have to keep in mind to check what happened to the elements in the group with AutoLayout.

This is very strange behavior. It would be great if the Figma team could hear us and fix this.

Nine times out of ten when applying auto-layout it does this, and I have to go hunting for the AP layer and correct it. Honestly it would be better to just remove the automatic AP toggle and just let us sort things how we want to – that is generally more efficient/quicker when working at pace.

I get what the Figma team were thinking with this, and if it worked well it would be nice to have. In saying that, absolute positioning is generally specific, so I can’t see set of base rules you work to for the program to understand when to apply it or not!

SOLUTION TO TRY

1. Select the content frame within the problematic component
2. Drag it around (this shouldn’t be possible in auto-layout, but that is part of the bug)
3. [Optional: “Undo” (command + z), so that your content frame is back in its original position before dragging - this fix does still works when you “undo”]
4. “Absolute Position” button will have “selected itself”
5. Deselect “Absolute Position” button
   =
   The issues should resolve themselves (i.e. component will resize properly and content will not be draggable), assuming you have the same problems you’re trying to solve.

More context if you aren’t sure this is your problem

The way I first discovered the issue was that after assigning auto-layout on a component, I could still drag the contents inside it around (only on certain copies or variants of the compenent), which made no sense to me because with autolayout things aren’t supposed to be freely draggable within and over the edges of the autolayout. Not to mention, And absolute position was NOT CHECKED in these cases.

I just discovered that as soon as I drag those (should-be-undraggable) elements around, then the Absolute Position checks ITSELF. From there I uncheck it and the autolayout/hug contents fixes itself (size of component adjusts properly using the padding I had previously

When I say this is a solution, this is more of a WORK AROUND, but it is a good temporary solution! Figma, please fix this bug 🙂