Super Powerful Figma How-to-Guides and Workshops
Effective learning content for Designlab's community and curriculum
Role
Workshop Facilitator
Timeline
Ongoing
Methods
Goal
LIVE WORKSHOPS
I'm a senior designer and I still attend Shawn's sessions because he makes things digestible, easy to understand, and delivers the content at key learning moments.
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Robbin Arcega
Sr. Product Designer at Procore
As I finished Designlab's UX Academy, the community manager reached out to me to ask if I was interested in running Figma workshops, "asking because you've been killing it with helping folks in the Figma channel and I certainly have learned a ton from you.”
The format and topics were left for me to decide. I used Discord to engage with the community, creating polls to gather large quantitative info about preferences and fostering discussion where possible to collect qualitative feedback.
Workshops covered topics like: Auto-layout, scrolling, smart-animate, components, variants, file organization, and more.
It was all very helpful! Thanks Shawn
Rica Faye G.
Graphic Designer
Thank you so much for running these workshops! I’ve learned more about auto-layout and actually grasped the concepts better in your demos than I have in watching all of the Figma-made videos and other content creator videos on auto-layout that I’ve searched for on YouTube. It finally makes sense and I’m already seeing a difference in the amount of time I’m saving while working on projects!
Jessica Glass
SEO Content Manager
Thank you so much for walking us through your process ! I look forward to next weeks workshop continuation
Rochelle Duong
Product Designer
Making my way through your first workshop and hopefully the others in the next few days. This content is SO needed, I'm so so glad you are running these. Excited to join Friday.
Hannah Rüfenacht
UI/UX Designer
Shawn Talvacchia leads workshops on Figma for my Bootcamp. The only reason I understand Auto-layout of because of him. He finally taught me in a way that made sense! He is by all means a wizard in Figma!!!
Nevin Winter
UI/UX Designer
I am 4 months into a design course and I would be lost without Shawn's workshops. His lessons are structured incredibly well and you can tell he genuinely enjoys learning about all the ins and outs of Figma. Super patient educator as well.
Paige Harari
UX/UI Designer
I have attended Shawn’s Figma workshops and believe that he is a great educator and problem-solver.
Connie Nguy
UX/UI Designer
Shawn Talvacchia is a Figma wiz and so great at explaining things in simple, clear language.
Penina Levy
Product Designer
Shawn Talvacchia is a big education nerd and has extensive teaching experience! As someone who's attended his Figma workshops at my design bootcamp, I can vouch for his skills in bringing people together and making complex concepts (hello auto-layout 👋) easy to understand.
Tula Daley
UX/UI Designer Intern at Vpply
Shawn Talvacchia is a Figma guru and patient instructor with a background in education
Alana Lipson
Product Designer
Shawn Talvacchia has never hesitated to help me with my wireframes and prototypes. His teaching background comes through--he explains things in a way that is clear and encouraging. Also, he's challenged me in how I use Figma to help me unlock its potential!
Kyra Cataby
Design Intern at Micah Group
Shawn Talvacchia helped me understand auto layouts through his detailed tutorials!!
Annie Chuong
UX Designer
VIDEO TUTORIALS
The success of the workshops led to large-scale project to create tutorial videos introducing Figma and design principles to students.
We hired Shawn Talvacchia at Designlab to help us produce 27 video tutorials demonstrating how to perform basic to complex tasks in Figma, like making gradients, creating a responsive card, or setting up scrolling in a prototype.
He went above and beyond by exposing students to concepts like design elements with parent-children relationships and making "playgrounds" of design assets for students to learn from. These 27 tutorials totaled up to just over 160 minutes, which for anybody who has created videos is a tremendous amount of work, and they did it in under five weeks!!!
It was a blast working with him. Together, we outlined learning objectives for this video series before he worked independently to fully write scripts, design examples and assets, record screencasts, and edit the recordings.
Timothy Moore
Learning Experience Designer & UX Researcher at Designlab
Information Architecture
At the start, I met with Timothy Moore, the Learning Experience Designer & UX Researcher at Designlab. Together we created an outline for the videos fitting them into the Foundation course curriculum. We discussed key points to address and planned communication and scheduling for the project.
As I wrote the scripts and contemplated the best way to organize and present the information, I would make some significant changes to the outline. I leaned on what I had learned from running workshops and put extra focus on common challenges students faced, like file organization, auto-layout resizing, and configuring components.
Project Management
The videos were only one part of the curriculum project. All of the work was organized in a Gannt Chart, allowing me to mark when I completed a video so others could review them.
To create more visibility and organization for my work, I created a Notion Database. This allowed the LX team to see exactly where I was at, read through scripts, and add comments. This was greatly appreciated by the team.