LAUNCHED: True Aspect Ratio Lock

New figma user here frustrated that I can’t figure out how to get my icons to have a fixed aspect ratio.

Holy llamas, they finally did it!? 🙌

https://www.figma.com/release-notes/?title=aspect-ratio-locked

FINALLY. INSANE HOW LONG THIS TOOK

Nice job Figma, thanks for getting round to this :)
an evolution i would like to see is aspect ratio variables we could apply to the lock

• designers could pick from predefined ratio’s
• developers could see that ratio in dev mode with either a raw aspect ratio value or a semantically referenced ratio
• we could have code parity to aspect ratio tokens

Didn't get this feature Figma please give me that! I really need it.

Hey everyone, thanks for your patience! It’s fully rolled out now!

You can now lock the aspect ratio of almost any object in Figma – including frames, shapes, images, videos, vectors, and text – so that the proportions of that object are respected as you scale the object or its parent container.

 More info in the release notes here.

The release is great (finally!) but it seems like the new ratio lock weirdly rounds up dimensions to the nearest pixel value (when you input a round value in width, height is round up causing a break in the aspect ratio, especially at very small, sub-pixel dimensions).

Anyone who worked with aspect ratio lock hacks knows that it’s annoying to have non-round heights but it should be the user’s choice to round or not. This currently makes the work of resizing vectors for icons very difficult.

Hey ​@AntoineP ,

Thanks for your detailed feedback! Does this occur with specific files or all files? And does it happen in the browser, desktop app, or both?

Can you try using the quick actions menu to turn off "Snap to pixel grid"? 

Please let us know if this resolves your issue!

The update is great, I wish the old icon was kept though, as it’s universal.

Celine_D wrote:

Hey ​@AntoineP ,

Thanks for your detailed feedback! Does this occur with specific files or all files? And does it happen in the browser, desktop app, or both?

Can you try using the quick actions menu to turn off "Snap to pixel grid"? 

Please let us know if this resolves your issue!

 

Thanks, disabling snap to pixel indeed solves the issue. I’m a little surprised because this wasn’t necessary to do the same kind of actions before the update. So now we have a slightly confusing behavior with snap to pixel enabled (which I would say is the default setting for most):

• When using locked aspect ratio, dimensions are rounded to the nearest pixel value
• In “free” aspect ratio constraints, they aren’t

Nothing indicates that this will happen, at least a tooltip would be welcome.

This is a great enhancement and I’m looking forward to seeing how it place in cards and layout components.
One issue I’m having, since its ‘replaced’ the old control, it seems to have also ignored the previous setting. I have an icon library with a few hundred components that have all gone from locked ratio to not locked - so I have to turn on the new setting and re-publish.

Has anyone else encountered this?

​@Seamus_Leonard2 I encountered the same thing, all or most of my icon components were ratio locked but they weren’t after the update. 

I’m sorry to hear this, but glad that I’m not just loosing my memory!

Another really weird thing is that its not tracked as a change in my library, meaning the file is not prompting me to ‘publish changes’ despite this modification.

Hey everyone! Thanks for sharing your feedback. 

In order to help our team investigate, could you clarify the following:

• When you manually re-enable Aspect Ratio Lock (ARL) does Figma prompt you to publish changes in your library, or does it not detect the change?
• Before the update, were all your icon components set to “Constrain Proportions,” or just some?
• What steps are you taking when trying to re-enable ARL and publish? (Feel also free to share a video recording if possible. We recommend uploading it to an external platforms such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Loom, and sharing the link directly in your post.)

Thank you 🙏🏼