This makes it easier to use components in designs for different screen sizes. And then you don’t have to calculate every time what 40% or 60% of the width is.
This also makes it easier to design scalable applications that grow with the width of the screen.
I have this text block component with a few nested auto layout containers, one of which is the body below the heading with padding on either side. Yes I have it flexible with “Fill container” and would much rather set a percentage width on that body, like anyone would in real life.
I thought of this today as I was designing a data table and the dev team asked what percentage of the width each column should be. Due to the absence of this feature, I had to do math. MATH!
In all seriousness, though, I think this makes a whole lot of sense considering that in CSS you are able to set dimensions of divs by using percentage units as well, and it would also save us the work of a LOT of workarounds involved to make an auto layout frame look the way we want.
Just throwing my hat in the ring here to say this would be an incredibly useful, fundamental layout feature. Being able to have an autolayout of 2 columns where I can set their widths to relative percentages (For example : col 1 is set to “Fill” and 70%, col 2 is set to “Fill” and 30%) would be really helpful.
I find myself coming to the Figma Forum to search out this topic nearly monthly, and at this point, I’m just looking for someone to show me a hack workaround that will suffice until this is added natively (I’ve even found old comments of my own about this that I forgot I left…hehehe). Please Figgie! Make this happen in June!
By using the percentage or relative units like em or pem that your design can adapt the different screen sizes. This eliminates the need of pixel calculation for each element.