My team needs to have a reusable template with a predefined layer structure so we don’t have to recreate the same file structure over and over and to keep our files consistent enough that designers, PMs and engineers know what to expect of our files regardless of the designer that worked on it.
We currently use a file the team manually duplicates by doing right click>duplicate and then move to the project they will be working on, but instead of this, we would prefer to just click on create new file and select a template from the dialog that figma provides. The problem we have is that you need to publish that file to the entire Figma community to be able to do this and the security policy of our company doesn’t allow this.
Should templates be public to the community by default? Can’t we just create a new template and make it available to our internal team only?
Thanks @Gleb I just did that! Is there a reason why this is not possible to do in the product today? Maybe figma decided to design that feature in the specific form it has today (which is likely to be the case, but I honestly just don’t understand the possible rationale behind designing the feature this way).
I guess it was just easier. It’s much simpler to build a static menu for everyone instead of highly customizable things for each user. So I too hope there are more improvements to come from the Figma team!
Actually, when I read about January 15th’s ‘Template Improvements’ I’d initially thought it meant what’s been posited in this thread! It would be really handy for my organization as well
Yes, I would create for each team / product a template with all the gems (auto layout etc). Would speed up the production and due to the template a given quality is insured.
This would be such a time saver and a nice feature to have to ensure consistency among teams. Make no sense I can use a public file as a template and not an internal one
Describe the problem your experiencing and how your idea helps solve this Something that can help a lot my team and me, is the possibility to add our Figma/FigJam files to the Browse templates modal. With that, we can create new common projects with our own templates.
Add as much context as possible (screenshots, Figma files, mockups, etc.) In that image, I included the two new sections: My templates and Team templates. From that, we could create new templates, add file templates and start to design from existing ones.
Ask questions to bring the community into the conversation
(e.g. Does anyone else experience this? Is anyone using a plugin or workaround to help solve this? etc. What do you think? Thanks!
Currently to “duplicate” a project you have to create a new empty project, duplicate individual files inside of a separate “template” project, make sure you’re grabbing the copies (not as big a deal) and then move them to your new project manually.
Ideally I would love to be able to just right click > Duplicate Project like you can do with a file. The community template functionality is essentially this same thing, but having a Team-only version of that would be awesome as an alternative. I’ll never be able to sell setting up our internal projects as a community template, so that’s a non-starter unfortunately.
Does anyone else find the process to create a similarly structured project to be a little cumbersome and repetitive?
Templates seems like a pretty basic feature. I’m trying out Figma, but this is a deal breaker. It’s great to have a tool that is strong in modular design like Figma, but I actually try to keep my workflow modular as well, and that means relying on templates.
This is the first thing I thought of when I saw the new “Templates” feature get launched. Thanks for creating this request.
One work-around we do now, that is actually working well, is we’ve created a design Patterns file, and convert screens into components. Of course, you need to edit within those screens, so they’re just meant to be used as starting templates. At least this way, we can control what’s published and approved, and most elements within them are tied to our main components file.
We upgraded to the organization license today and one thing that was touted was being able to set templates across the teams. But seems we can only view community templates - which actually takes longer to find your org’s uploaded template than to just simply duplicate an existing one in your team’s workspace.
Seems like a feature that should have existed quite some time ago. I would expect the workflow to work something like
User taps “New design file”
Automatically a file is created using the set template by the team. Being able to manage it on a team-basis as well as organization level would be really handy.
+1 This has always felt like such a huge missed opportunity. Today, my team has a file that we have to find, duplicate, and overwrite for every new project.
It would make way more sense to allow teams/orgs to set up Page Structure, Cover Page, screen sizes, etc. in a managed template, and have that available for designers when starting a new project. I mean come on, Sketch had this feature in 2013.
