Instances as Variants

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1

While I really really like the new variant feature, and have been using it a lot, what I don’t enjoy is how complex my components are becoming, specially with nesting if I want to manage my variants on multiple levels for example:

say I have a master component, and would like to manage its state with variants on top of which I also wanted to manage another set of variants say type, the results as you can imagine will either be

  1. an amalgamation of what I can only describe as a ‘wrapper hell’ of several components with the master wrapped in a state frame and a type frame, which inevitably means a high cost to managing each wrapper for each individual variant separately (e.g. resizing, auto-layout properties…etc)

  2. or a plethora of components completely disassociated with each other if I detach the master component -another hell in itself when universal changes are applied

I really think the best solution for the above is to allow instances to be combined as variants, thus allowing designers to keep that tidiness when it comes to nesting component; at the same time fully benefit from the wonderful things variants is bringing to us.

Please consider

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Related:

3

What I would like is to be able to “program” instances. So that I can have a property called “with icon” with is a toggle that toggles visibility of a layer. Oh, that would be great :slight_smile:

4

there was a plugin that did this, I think it was called “component variables” or something like that

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5

Wow, this is great Figma - Component Variables | A plugin that helps customize Figma components in an orderly and automatic manner. Create and ed...
It would be really neat to have this feature by default. Also, this plugin doesn’t allow editing of multiple instances, which is a shame. But it would be great, if I could then change text layers like in Sketch. Figma should do something like this.