Bug: creating and using style with fill pattern

surprised more people aren’t mentioning this. are there any updates?

None so far.

Hey All, thank you for flagging this! 

I just tried creating a Test style pattern fill, and this seems to not be working for me either.

When attempting to edit the style, please note that the Pattern icon will not show up as Fill option, but to choose another pattern, you can hover over the Pattern displayed to Select a new source.

The hiccup I come across is when selecting a new pattern from the canvas, nothing happens. Can you confirm if this is the same behavior you’re experiencing? 

If so, are either of you also able to share a file and more details with our technical quality team here? https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Our team would love to investigate why this is happening further. 

The main concern is that instances from privately published components containing a fill pattern do not appear. It is as if the pattern is not published alongside the component.

To replicate the issue:

1. Create a Figma document
2. Create a frame that will be used as a fill pattern (put some layers in it such as polygons)
3. Create a component and set its background to the fill pattern with the frame created at step 2
4. Publish the Figma document with that component
5. Create a new Figma document
6. Add the library published at step 4 to it (from the assets panel on the left)
7. Import the component created at step 3

Result: the component without its fill pattern (it actually shows a default pattern consisting of dots).

Expected: the component with its defined pattern.

Below is a screenshot of our table component. The top one shows the result after importing it. The second one, after manually setting the fill pattern.
 

In addition to this issue, the fill pattern is not well supported in styles. Creating a style with a fill pattern results in an odd behavior where the inspector panel doesn’t show the “fill pattern” tab, and the color style does not appropriately preview the fill pattern (instead, it shows the default fill pattern with the gray dots). As a result, it is not possible to update existing styles by adding a fill pattern to it. Furthermore, as with components, the fill pattern is not exported when reusing the style in other documents.

Hope that makes sense.

djv wrote:

Hey All, thank you for flagging this! 

I just tried creating a Test style pattern fill, and this seems to not be working for me either. When attempting to edit the style, please note that the Pattern icon will not show up as Fill option, but to choose another pattern, you can hover over the Pattern displayed to Select a new source. 

 

The hiccup I come across is when selecting a new pattern from the canvas, nothing happens. Can you confirm if this is the same behavior you’re experiencing? 

If so, are either of you also able to share a file and more details with our technical quality team here? https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Our team would love to investigate why this is happening further. 

Thanks for checking this out. Yes I also get this bug: the fill pattern of styles doesn’t seem to be changeable, and the pattern icon is not present in the fill option.

I filed a bug report in addition to this post and Ryan K is having a look.

I further investigated the issue and observed the following:

1. When creating a fill pattern based of a component variant or a component instance, the fill pattern does not get exported well (the exported component that uses that fill pattern shows up with gray dots).
2. Ditto when creating a style.
3. However, when creating a fill pattern by selecting just a frame, it does get exported as expected.
4. Whether the library is private or not does not change anything.

So there is definitely an issue regarding the configuration of the pattern: should components or component instances be allowed or not? As of now, anything appears to be selectable, but only elements that aren’t components or component instances seem to be exportable.

In addition, it would be great if patterns composed of local variables would update accordingly based on the scope set on the element that uses the pattern. This is currently not the case, but looks more like a missing feature rather than a bug (although it feels inconsistent: patterns are basically dynamic duplication of elements, which can be anything — I could create a large frame filled with duplicated elements, and any local variable these elements use would adjust itself accordingly based on the context).