Naming your layers

The way I’ve designed I’ve never had a need for naming my layers.

I never got into Photoshop—where it seemed a requirement to have good labeling practice. And in Ilustrator it just wasn’t a thing that you did, because of the visual nature of grouping and organizing work.

In Figma I’ve never named layers, because again I built out boards based on visual alignment.

But something changed in the last month. I’ve started using auto layout in earnest. It’s not that I didn’t know how to use it before, but the way auto layouts worked messed with my flow for designing.

I’ve since modified that approach, and am finding auto layouts as a helpful constraint rather than a limiter.

As a result I’m spending more time digging through layers and organizing the relationship between objects in those layers.

There then, rose the beast I’ve been able to ignore for nearly twenty years. My layer names stare at me, unnamed creatures with unknown creations hidden underneath.

Layer naming suddenly became a necessity. Thankfully—maybe just in time for my needing them—Figma announced AI layer naming. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than unnamedlayer84. With two clicks I can rename an entire art board, and the naming structure is clear enough to understand.

Another positive side effect has been how auto layout works, it’s similar to CSS flex, so it gets me thinking early on about how the design will work in code.