LAUNCHED: True Aspect Ratio Lock

Been struggling with this one for sooooo long and the new UI’s Autolayout doesn’t like the plugins/ways around it. Please add this feature asap

+1 We need this 🥴
Why do we get ghosted for 3 years?

Hey all - I ran across this yesterday in my feed which suggests Figma is thinking about this. x.com
Take a look and comment I guess?

I would add that while a lot of users need this feature for images, but it is also needed for shapes as well.

Hey All,

@Matt_Rea1 is correct. This is already on our team’s radar for future improvement.

It’s obviously taking much longer to build out than previously intended, but with your votes and feedback, we’ve already built up a good case on why we need to hustle with this.

Bump. We really need this. And imho its such a basic feature that this should’ve been a thing for a long time.

This is a really basic feature, i cant for the life of me understand why it is not available. I am going to read through the workarounds. So confused by this.

Yep, You are here a long time… I have to join to You 🙂 I agree. We need aspect ratio option. +1

+1 constrain proportions is confusing with the current components/autolayout

Thank you! This is good to hear, although it took literally years for this to be even acknowledged by someone from Figma, which for a company the size of Figma and considering how much it costs to use is not great.

I think you need to say ‘we hear you, we are considering it alongside all the other feature requests’ or if you are going to work on it, ‘we hear you and we are actively working on it’ way more often. 🙂

We hear you, @Joe_Garlick. I wish there was more I could do in regards to being able to provide more accurately paced timelines, but my community team here just passes along feedback.

To be transparent, teams will ultimately decide what they build, but they do use votes from the community and feedback to prioritize top requests.

What makes this feature request a bit more promising is that Miggi, who tweeted about this on X(formerly Twitter), is a Designer Advocate. The tweet in itself shows that the team is building their case to prioritize this sooner rather than later.

P.S. I didn’t start at Figma until August 2021. Up until then, the forum was primarily run by the community. We have a full team now able to advocate for the community.

Thank you!! Really appreciate the communication!

Hi Figma team,

I feel like this should’ve been a default feature considering the addition of the variables feature.

Sidenote, since I feel this may be relevant: Another strange exclusion from the variables feature is that there isn’t a way to have interactions between variables either which is kind of strange (e.g. A number “variable-1” = 100, and another number “variable-2” = #variable-1 + 40, resulting in variable-2 = 140), despite that the prototype interactions under “Conditional” allows for interactive variables and complex conditionals just like above. Is this just an oversight or are these in-development and unreleased?

This ‘locked aspect ratio’ feature doesn’t seem like it’d be too hard to implement since it would just be grabbing the unchanged value (e.g. if you’re stretching horizontally, the height would be unchanged) and scaling it proportionally to what % the changed value has differed by, only if the toggle for the feature was on. I feel like adoption rate would be rather high considering the actual need for it as expressed in this thread.

I suppose only few edge cases would be as follows:

1. If you’re modifying two values at once, then it should just unlock the ‘locked aspect ratio’, since there would be no way of actually keeping the aspect ratio if both are modified at different % rates.

2. If you’re modifying either dimension value (H/W) via the layers interaction, the value should also remain locked aspect unless both dimension values are modified simultaneously.

Looking forwards to developers creating features people actually need!

Here is a Hack I found on Medium, sharing in case it can help someone making components:
Felix’s article

Am I a joke to you?

AI was prioritized over this. Got it.

Another +1 for this. This is such basic functionality! There are lots of components, generally more imagery-oriented ones like icons, for which aspect ratio locking is critical. This is not something we should be relying on plugins or hacks to have.

I like your approach

@dvaliao It would be really great and much appreciated, if your dev team can prioritize this feature.

Thanks in advance

Basic and much needed feature for responsive purpose. +1000

Wild that the community has been begging for this for nearly 4 years now.

This is a basic design requirement and I can’t believe that this hasn’t been dealt with. Figma would rather move the chairs around on the UI than address fundamental design flaws. To the Figma representative that ‘just passes along the feedback’ - please pass it on again and ask why this design flaw is never addressed.

Please release this and de-prioritize lame gen AI features

This is an extraordinarily frustrating “feature”. It’s almost literally the dictionary picture of “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” It would seem that the word “constrain” is being used in some obscure way that only makes sense to someone within the Figma org. If I see the words “constrain proportions”, I expect:

• If I drag to resize, it will do so proportionally, without the need to hold “Shift”
• If I enter a numeric value in either the Width or Height fields in the right panel, the other dimension will scale accordingly (i.e.: proportionally)
• If I use a variable to set one of the dimensions, the other dimension will scale accordingly (i.e.: proportionally)
• If I have the object in an auto-layout frame, set to “Fill”, I expect the constrained object to scale proportionally as its parent’s width changes

This seems like a pretty basic feature/fix, here… what are we missing? Any updates on where this is on the backlog, @Figma_Product?

Thank you @Dan_Shipley for that. I appreciate your reminder that the Product team has lost their way.

We saw Adobe do this with Photoshop and 3D when their marketing department thought that would be the way to sell more subs. Now it seems Figma is prioritizing ridiculous gen-AI stuff over real tools that humans can use to (keep) doing their jobs more efficiently and effectively.

I really would like to see a software company maintain their integrity and just continue to refine and hone in on what made them excellent in the first place, not bow to the pressure of their VCs and hitch their little carts to whatever trendy horse Marketing tells them to.

Sorry for the rant. I’ve been posting way too much in the Figma forums and suggestions lately, and that’s a bad sign.

(I should add that I’m such a huge fan of this software and can sing its praises over AI, XD and yes even Sketch - for UX work - for days. I’m worked up because I have been having this fight for nearly 30 years with software companies that have amazing products and then just get lost and lose focus. Figma has been a fantastic tool, and just needed another year or two’s focus on their UX backlog and technical debt, but like the others, they are chasing the shiny new thing, while users just hunger for excellence and perfection of the existing features and toolset).

The year is 2067. Figma has overtaken Adobe as the premiere Galactic Design Lord Enterprise®. Figma stitches worlds and concepts and relationships together seamlessly in realtime. True Aspect Ratio Lock is a myth that gets talked about from time to time.