After moving some projects to Figma, it was one of the first features I looked for, but couldn’t find. Needed, indeed. Quite basic. Plugins are cool, but such functionality should be part of the core solution.
I’ve spent an embarrassingly long time trying out different methods to do alignment operations efficiently with different anchor points.
What I can tell you is that unless the anchor is smaller than the other alignment object, you don’t need to fiddle with telling figma which object is the anchor.
There are two alignment fundamentals you need to know to align stuff quick and efficiently:
Alignment on a single object/frame/group selection aligns relative to the parent frame
Alignment on multiple selection aligns to the selection bounding box.
We can use this information to align things however we want.
In your example for instance, the button text is smaller than the button. So if you align to bottom then the text will move into the button area and thus the button area is the same as the selection bounding box, and any alignment actions will only apply to the text. This requires equal or less clicks than assigning anchors, but even so I’d recommend learning the alignment hotkeys to significantly speed up the process.
If the alignment object is larger than the anchor object then you have to jump through some framing hoops if you want to center align a larger object to a smaller one (the quickest way I’ve found at least).
The steps written out goes like this:
Wrap the smaller object in a frame (ctrl/cmd +alt/opt + G)
Hold ctrl/cmd + alt/opt and drag the edge of the new frame facing the larger object
Drag the larger object into the frame (hold down shift if you only want to align it parallel to the anchor object)
With only the larger object selected, align it to your liking
(Optional I guess) Select the parent frame and remove it (ctrl/cmd + shift + G)
This is a workflow I’ve become comfortable with. Maybe using a plugin is more convenient, but this is just my two cents on how to aligns things.
This is my favorite feature in Illustrator. I can align object etc very fast and efficiently. Most
of the plugins dont even align properly so i would be very thankful for a native feature like this to be added.
Well implemented in Omnigraffle: The first object you select makes it the key object. Missing this!
To be fair, excellent snapping in Figma has compensated for this shortcoming, but for some reason since the introduction of Sections, snapping seems harder to control (too sensitive… So missing the Omni feature again!)
Just reinforcing, as everyone has already mentioned, the importance of having this feature by default.
I think before wanting to integrate with Firefly or any other feature moving forward. Figma team, let’s look at the basics and simple first.