Three plugins for setting up Text Styles in Figma — quickly!
In this article, I cover three plugins I use to set up and update text styles in Figma. Why is this something I want to share? Well, Figma is the go-to tool for product design teams. The tool comes into its own when using design systems and shared libraries where styles can be pulled into all of your files. But, what if you don’t work on a team with a design system? Or you need to configure new styles at the start of each project? This is when setting up text styles can become a bit of a chore, and a hell of a lot of mouse clicks.
As a web-focused designer who starts from almost zero with each project, this is a struggle I know all too well. Fortunately, I have found efficient ways of setting up text styles with three great plugins.
I’m going to cover three use cases and a final bonus tip. I hope these help next time you are starting a design and speed up the process.
Contents
- Generating type
- Creating styles
- Adjusting styles
- Building your cloneable template
The plugins you need
1. Generating type
Before creating styles we need to generate some type. Doing this manually is lengthy so here is where we use the first plugin of this guide — Typescales, by Marvin Bruns.
Go to a new page and run the plugin. Now select a typescale to use. Feel free to select whatever typescale you like. I tend to use the major third and make some small tweaks so the type increases in 8px increments (shout out to the 8px grid system). I’ll put my configuration and tweaks beneath.
If you’d like the tweaks I’ve made then these are listed below (letter size/line-height):
16/24, 20/28, 24/32, 32/40, 40/48, 48/56, 64/72
2. Creating styles
This is my favourite part, here we’ll use Typestyles by Marvin Bruns. With ALL of your type selected (feel free to add underline versions and different weights before this step), run the Typestyles plugin. Now we can customise the name of our text styles using the text properties, or add custom names. I’ll use how I set up mine as an example below.
My configuration:
And here’s the result:
Hot tip for using this method with two different fonts
If you want to use another typeface then try adding custom properties. I’ve outlined how I do this below.
Here I’ve created some secondary type by duplicating the blocks of text and changing the font. When I run typestyles this time I will deal with the different text styles separately.
Then in Typestyles, I’ve added a ‘Custom’ text property and renamed it to ‘Primary’. This for the primary font style I selected previously.
For the secondary text style I repeat the process, only, using ‘Secondary’ in the custom field.
Here’s the result:
3. Adjusting styles
So you’ve got your styles all set up. Now, you want to change the font, or perhaps the weight of the bold style … ah. Don’t worry, this is super easy with our last plugin — Batch Styler by Jan Six.
As an example, I’m going to adjust the font family of my primary text styles from the previous section. Here we go.
To begin, I’ll run batch styler — you don’t need anything selected. Then I’ll filter the list of styles using the search bar and typing ‘Primary’, then and selecting all the results.
Now I’ll just switch the font family and update the styles.
And voila! We’re now using Helvetica.
You can use batch styler to update font sizes and weights as well, it’s great for making tweaks to a base set of styles — I’ll cover this more in the next section.
4. Bonus tip — Creating a cloneable template
This section covers setting up a template file with your typescales and styles configured already, so you can duplicate it before starting your next project. This removes step 1 & 2, and means — providing you are happy with the typescale — you can just duplicate the file, run batch styler to make any updates, and get on designing!
So, if you’ve followed this tutorial, you would have created some styles already. You could rename this file ‘Template’ or whatever you please and perhaps set a thumbnail. Now when you want to start a project, simply duplicate this file and start working on the new version — your text styles will be ready to use.
If you’d like to have a look at my version of the template file created for this tutorial, you can find the link below:
Thanks for reading, check out my portfolio site for more content like this.
