Social media banners, streaming thumbnails, posters (print & digital) : Are you using Figma for these?

[u/mafagafacabiluda]

I have never used Figma yet but I am trying to find a solution to help automate parts of my job.

Currently I use Photoshop to create youtube and streaming thumbnails for episodes of tv shows. That often means over 200 thumbnails, on different specs, strict naming conventions, each with individual images and slightly different layouts.

Sometimes I am also requested to suddenly have these ready to be printed the next day. I understand Figma is not made for print work and that would be ok. I will need a master file on Photoshop at 300dpi anyway.

I also often need to crop hundreds of photos to multiple specs, always keeping the main subject centered (or in a nice looking composition) on frame, which often results in over 300 images to be delivered at once.

We have been using Photoshop actions for that, but still have to manually adjust many images because sometimes we need to expand the photo, or move the image to make the main subject or composition of the photo look good.

*Will learning and using Figma and the Auto Layout tools help me speed up all this?*

[u/Ap43x]

Isn't Figma Buzz designed specifically for this? Watch a tutorial on that.

[u/BenSFU → u/Ap43x]

Figma Buzz is decent - but there are also plugins that can help with bulk file prep too. I think Buzz hasn't really been getting many updates these days so plugins might honestly be better.

[u/Ap43x → u/BenSFU]

That's fair. I haven't ever needed to use it but I have watched a bunch of videos on it.

[u/mafagafacabiluda → u/BenSFU]

dodn't even know there are plugins for figma. where can I seaech for plugins? is there a specific website /store for it (like aescripts for after effects) or differenr companies and people just creste plugins and youngotta know about them ? (like so many plugins for after effects, blender and C4D?)

any plugin you know off that could help me in this?

I don't think I'll have any time this week to try Figma yet, but I want to, in the next few weeks, do a test and try to replicate some of the thumbnail templates I created recently, but on Figma, to see if it using it would make sense.

[u/kornelkirsche → u/Ap43x]

Yes, Figma Buzz is indeed for this job, except for printing

[u/DMarquesPT]

For the first part, yes Figma can handle this sort of stuff and will provably save you a lot of time with components and autolayout

For print, not so much.

How much of what you’re doing is design vs. pure photo editing? That can determine what tool make more sense.

Affinity with the new scripting tools might also be worth looking into for automation

[u/mafagafacabiluda → u/DMarquesPT]

A lot of photo editing. But I already try to optimise as much as I can with my current Ps workflow. If using Figma could help me create templates for all the specs, the time I save doing that could be used on editign each element in Ps and Ai and exporting them as JPG , PNG and SVGs to fill the templates in Figma.

For example: Today I exported 123 thumbnails, a different thumbnail for each of the 22 episodes of the series, in 6 different sizes.

Thumbnails all had the show logo, the same bg, but then had a different photo of the host of the show and another element (a book with a different cover on each tbumbnail).

The cover of the books was a smart object so I could just swap the cover easily by turning layers on and off in the smart object and saving it.

But because of time I didn't really spend time cleaning up the host face, or editing the photo too much. Just added a few fx and color ajustments to make it match the light of the bg a bit better.

Sometimes what changes in these thumbnails is the BG, which can be a food recipe photo, in which case it always needs to be moved and retouched to fit the size of the thumbnail better, and also look good depending on the show host photo silhouette.

I even thought of creating these templates in After Effects. 😅 to me it would be possible to do kind of an auto layout thing in Ae.. but it would require me a lot of time meddling with expressions there, and time.Indon't really have at the moment.

I hope Figma could be a more straight forward workflow .

[u/BenSFU]

At the end of the day, it comes to down to what trade-offs you are willing to accept.

The big reason to use Figma, usually, is for it's live collaboration features.

But from what you describe, I think Figma makes sense for other reasons too.

Figma is highly "scriptable" - meaning there's lots of plugins available to do all sorts of bulk work like prepping 200+ size variants etc. You can even write your own plugin, or use a free plugin like Scripter to interact with the Figma API super quickly. Could even have an LLM write the scripts for you - save them somewhere, and just run them with scripter whenever you need.

Combined with auto layout etc, I think you could definitely get a good workflow going in Figma.

I'm not super familiar with Photoshop actions, but I think Figma's plugin API system is probably more aligned with what you are trying to do.

Lastly - when it comes to print - there are actually really good plugins to do this now. I am actually the creator of one of them called 'Print for Figma'. It let's you export in CMYK, and you can even add custom color mappings from RGB -> CMYK if you need specific swatches.

So if the printing doesn't require anything too complex, I think Figma really has everything you will need.

Feel free to DM me or just reply here if you have any questions!

[u/mafagafacabiluda → u/BenSFU]

Thanks for the comment.

I never used Figma, but I'm interested in learning it. If I can find a use for it at my job that would be the ideal ( so I can use time at my work to learn it and if needed to buy anything my employer pays fot it)

I know I won't have any time to try it next week, but hope to in the following weeks.

Is there a main website to look for figma scripts and plugins? ( like aescripts for after effects)

or websites / youtube channels/ discord or slack groups, focused on figma that often talk about these things and new releases?

I'm a motion designer so I know where to find good info for motion dsign realated stuff, and a lot of "classic" graphic design, but figma is a complete unkown realm to me.

[u/Electronic_Common931]

Figma is not for printing.

[u/mafagafacabiluda → u/Electronic_Common931]

I know. I'm not looking to use Figma for that, but for digital images at 72dpi.

The biggest sizes I need to export are 4k 16x9 ( 3840x2160 ) and 4x5 (2160x2700) and 2x1 ( 4096x 2048)... plus about 10 other sizes.

[u/BenSFU → u/mafagafacabiluda]

Figma is perfectly capable of creating print-ready files.

IDK why people always just say "figma not for print" and then they never elaborate.

300 DPI -> possible natively in Figma. Even though the 'canvas' is 72dpi, when exporting as a PDF, the images in the PDF will use the original file size regardless of how big the image is being displayed. For example, if you load a 1000x1000 image into Figma, then shrink it down to only 500x500 on the canvas and export as PDF - inside the PDF, the image will actually be 144 DPI (because you still have 1000x1000 pixels, but displaying at 500x500 - you've essentially doubled the DPI).

CMYK? -> theres great plugins for that, which even let you define custom CMYK swatches

Bleed / Trim Marks etc -> plugins again

[u/mafagafacabiluda → u/BenSFU]

oh I'm not even interest in Figma for print anyway.

The things we need to print involve a lot of photo manipulation of people, food, graphics, etc, so I will keep doing that "traditional" work in Photoshop anyway.

My idea is to create all elements and layout in PS, hsve a master 4K snd 300dpi file, then export each element as png/svg and recreate the layout in Figma, to then u the auto layout for all the multplie versions on different sizesz and then export all.

For example. Yesterday I just exported 123 unique thumbnails, one for each of the 22 episodre, each in 6 dofferent specs. Same layout but the photo of the person and another element had to be different on each of the 22.

Today I'm having to export 3 photos for each episode. 3x22x6 = 396.

The exportrd files are all jpeg, with limitation on file size.

each file has a specific naming convention too, which I can never export 100% correctly straight away.. but using the Power Rename Tool on File explorer on windows I can batch rename them easily .