Figma UI UX Design Advanced: Become a Figma Pro
Daniel Scott · Adobe Certified Trainer
A deep, technique-dense sequel that rewards Figma users who already know the basics but drags in places with rambling delivery and mid-course bug patches.
Daniel Scott's "Figma UI UX Design Advanced" picks up exactly where a fundamentals course leaves off, and it commits to that premise for over sixteen hours. This is not a highlight reel of advanced tricks strung together loosely. It is a long, methodical build of a single event-ticketing app, with auto layout, components, variables, and animation each getting dedicated, multi-part treatment.
Structure and depth
The course splits its heaviest topics, particularly auto layout, into a Level 1 and Level 2 pass, returning to the subject later once other foundations are in place. That structure works reasonably well for retention, though it also means related content is scattered rather than consolidated, so a learner hunting for "everything about auto layout" has to jump between two points in the timeline. The spacing lessons, constraint-versus-auto-layout comparisons, and file-handling videos are practical and specific rather than conceptual, which suits designers who already know the vocabulary and want the mechanics filled in.
The variables and design tokens section is where the course earns its "advanced" label most convincingly. Building light and dark modes, plus compact and comfortable spacing variants, from a single set of variables is a genuinely useful workflow that many working designers still do manually. The min-width and max-width walkthrough is a small but well-chosen inclusion, showing how to lock a button's size range using the newer Figma dropdown controls, including a callout that the technique changed mid-production and the video had to be re-recorded to match.
Strengths and weaknesses
The animation and prototyping material is the strongest stretch. Rather than treating spring presets as a black box, it isolates stiffness, dampening, and mass as separate variables and demonstrates each one's effect side by side with duplicated examples. That kind of hands-on comparison is rare in Figma courses and gives a real intuition for prototyping physics instead of just naming the sliders. Typography coverage goes past font pairing into OpenType features: alternate characters, tabular versus proportional numbers, and variable font weight axes, with a tangent into independent type foundries as a reason to move beyond default Google Fonts choices.
The weaknesses are mostly about pacing and delivery rather than content. The teaching style is conversational to the point of rambling, with frequent asides, jokes, and live troubleshooting of Figma bugs that crop up because the software changed during production. Those live-fix moments, such as icons defaulting to absolute positioning instead of stacking normally, are honestly useful for showing how to diagnose real problems, but they also pad the runtime and can make dense sections feel less tightly edited than they should.
The closing class project, which asks learners to assemble a full app flow from onboarding through checkout, ties the scattered lessons into one portfolio piece, and that's a fair test of whether the material stuck. For someone who already has Figma fundamentals down and wants the specific mechanics behind variables, spring animation, and responsive components, the depth here is worth the time investment. For anyone still shaky on basic auto layout or frames, the assumed baseline will make several early lessons feel rushed.
The standout
The spring animation breakdown, where stiffness, dampening, and mass are each isolated and demonstrated side by side, gives a genuinely rare, concrete grasp of prototyping physics most Figma courses never touch.
What you will learn
- Build multi-level nested auto layouts with correct absolute vs relative positioning
- Set minimum and maximum width/height constraints on auto layout frames
- Create and apply variables for light/dark mode and compact/comfortable spacing
- Use spring animation settings (stiffness, dampening, mass) for realistic prototyping motion
- Choose and configure variable fonts and OpenType features like tabular numbers
- Tidy and document components for handoff using Dev Mode and portfolio-ready file structure
Best for: Designers who finished a Figma fundamentals course and want the specific mechanics behind auto layout, variables, and prototyping that self-teaching tends to skip.
Skip it if: Total beginners to Figma, or anyone who wants a tightly edited, no-tangents course rather than a long, conversational walkthrough with asides and corrections.