Define default padding for Auto Layout (or set to 0)

Sean_Sands · 2021-03-16T21:00:30+00:00

Describe the problem your experiencing and how your idea helps solve this When you create an autolayout frame, it always defaults to 10px. Many design systems call for an 8px grid and in many cases, users don’t want ANY padding especially where edge-to-edge designs are concerned. Ask questions to bring the community into the conversation What are everyone’s thoughts about the following solutions?: Default autolayout padding based on the big nudge amount in your settings Allow for tokenization of padding/margin grids and offer up autolayout parameters based upon those tokens Allow users to override the padding to 0px at the creation of the autolayout frame by using an alternative key command like ctrl+shift+a (command on mac)

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 16, 2021
77 replies
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Describe the problem your experiencing and how your idea helps solve this
When you create an autolayout frame, it always defaults to 10px. Many design systems call for an 8px grid and in many cases, users don’t want ANY padding especially where edge-to-edge designs are concerned.
Ask questions to bring the community into the conversation
What are everyone’s thoughts about the following solutions?:

Default autolayout padding based on the big nudge amount in your settings
Allow for tokenization of padding/margin grids and offer up autolayout parameters based upon those tokens
Allow users to override the padding to 0px at the creation of the autolayout frame by using an alternative key command like ctrl+shift+a (command on mac)

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mattaningram

New Participant

The majority of the time that I set a frame to auto-layout and it automatically adds 10px padding, I have to remove the padding. Ideally this would default to 0.

This can particularly be annoying when the additional padding messes up layout relative to a parent frame’s constraints, and can become more than 1 step to fix.

Baffour

Big fan of 0px padding personally! Most of the time I’m defining spacing between items in an auto layout frame. So 99% of the time I don’t use padding.

For that reason I wouldn’t love the big nudge amount idea because I wouldn’t want to set that to zero. Think your alternative key command is a good one, though I still feel like no padding should be the default!

Just today I was using auto-layout, wrapping individual layers in frames so I could change the alignment, or do X or Y that requires several nested frames. So it does get painful that you have to stop and remove the padding every time.

Sean_SandsAuthor

I don’t think any of the above should be done in isolation. They don’t each solve the whole problem. If anything one or more of these could be done quickly and easily in a simple release while the larger tokenization issue gets addressed. I totally agree about creating AL frames to have to make wrappers in order to set the correct alignments and positioning. I hate having to do it all the time. I just don’t think that setting it to zero by default is the right approach for all cases, the key command though would facilitate that need and a big nudge mapping would allow for a place to set a default as nudges are typically used in the increments that people use for their paddings, etc.

Richard_Earney

I feel like Default to 0 makes most sense, with a small button to quickly add Big Nudge Amount (like the small padding icon)

Gleb

Power Member

This is far from ideal, but I usually work around this issue by first wrapping the object in a frame, then adding Auto Layout. Two shortcuts: Alt + Cmd/Ctrl + G, Shift + A.

Harald_Skogland

Active Member

If you still want to add more AL frames outside of those the new ones will still have the 10 and 8 values for spacing and padding.

Harald_Skogland

Active Member

Gave my vote for having 0 as default unless values can be guessed by Figma. I really like that items that already have even spacing, will have that spacing applied in the AutoLayout frame. I would also like to have Top,Right,Bottom,Left padding values always visible in the inspection panel as I keep having to check them.

Ruth_Thomson

Autolayout defaults to 10px padding, and top left alignment.

The alignment particularly annoys me because I only rarely use top left, and so I’m constantly having to change it. It would be great if we could customize the default autolayout settings, perhaps also changing resizing and padding as well. I like the defaults but I am sure there are some use cases where it would be useful to have the auto layout specified in a certain way for a period of time.