Is this SE site the appropriate one for “Figma architecture questions”?

Question

I asked the following question on ux.stackexchange.com, but it got closed as off-topic. Also, I suppose it does not belong on neither Stack Overflow, graphicdesign.stackexchange.com nor superuser.com. Is it acceptable here? If not, is there any SE site where the question is on topic? Thanks is advance for the help. I tried to identify the appropriate site before the original post, so I'm in need of mentoring.

In Figma, is it not possible to use the columns as a CSS-style grid system?

I wonder if I have hit a limitation in Figma. As an interaction designer, I would like to specify the responsiveness of a web based application, so that the front end developers know how the interface should appear at all browser widths. To that end, I have tried to make the columns behave akin to the CSS-based grid system as championed by e.g. Bootstrap. But I failed in achieving what I want. Basically, what I want is this basic responsiveness, but column based. I assume that would make it far easier for the developers to know how to implement the design, since they use a grid system in CSS. But as shown in this video, none of my experiments work.

I wonder if it boils down to this: If a child element has:

• horisontal constraint set to “Scale” and
• vertical constraint set to “Hug contents”

Then the parent element cannot have:

• vertical constraint set to “Hug contents”

Is this is a known limitation in Figma?

If yes, are there well-supported plugins that can work around this problem, or is it outside Figma's scope to offer this type of alignment with CSS-based grid systems?

Obviously, it would be awesome if the solution also supports breakpoints.

Answer 1

I don't think your question would be a good fit here.

When we say that design-level questions can be on topic, this relates to software design, not to UI design. Software design is about structuring software components. For example, a software design question in the area of CSS might involve how to structure/organize a CSS code base (which could be answered by a mention of BEM), but not how to achieve a particular layout.

Your question seems to be about how to achieve a particular layout in Figma. This is a question about that particular tool. Questions about tools can be on topic here to the degree that they are about the tool's role in a software development process, but how to use development tools is out of scope. For example, questions about Git branching strategies are on topic here, whereas questions about the Git command line interface are not.

Instead, questions about using software development tools can be more on topic on Stack Overflow. There is a steady stream of questions on the Figma tag, though admittedly few answers. Instead of asking whether Figma supports feature X, it might be better to ask how to achieve feature X with Figma. That is, emphasizing that you want to solve a particular problem (responsive grid systems). In this particular case, resources outside of the Stack Exchange network might prove to be more useful. For example, https://www.reddit.com/r/FigmaDesign/ seems to be more active, though I have no idea about the quality of discussion there.