Learn Figma, Flux and Jekyll

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool that allows you to responsively design your applications, with resolution presets for all of the most popular devices. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of Figma’s toolset that you can use for various design functions. 

We will start from scratch, then walk through scenarios you may encounter when designing a website or application. We will cover building reusable designs — known as “components” in Figma — all the way up to prototyping your designs to show screen transitions and animations between state. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the basics of Figma so you can use it to your advantage when building your next app or website.

Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma.

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The Beginner's Guide to Figma

Figma is a powerful design tool built with web technologies. Using the same technologies you can extend it with plugins.
You can use Typescript and/or javascript, you can load your favorite UI frameworks like Vue.js or React.js and build powerful plugins.

Using a plugin you can:

* Load Real Data from your server and visualize it 
* Change elements in your design programmatically 
* Convert your design to JSX or HTML, the sky is the limit

Learning these skills will help you make your design workflow faster by making Figma doing exactly what you want





JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

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Create a Figma Plugin Using Typescript

Jekyll is a blog-aware static site generator. You can write text in markdown or HTML and Jekyll uses layouts to create a static website. You can tweak how you want the site URLs to look, what data gets displayed on the site, and more.

After watching the collection you'll be able to:

* Install Jeykll and run it locally
* Create a new blog post
* Install plugins to add new features to your blog

Jekyll is a parsing engine bundled as a ruby gem used to build static websites from dynamic components such as templates, partials, liquid code, markdown, etc. Jekyll is known as "a simple, blog aware, static site generator".

jekyll

Create A Blog With Jekyll

In this video, you will learn how to bootstrap a Basic Figma plugin using the Figma app

Bootstrap a Figma Plugin

In this video, you will learn how to send and receive data from Figma to use it in your plugin

Communicate between the plugin and Figma 

In this video, you will learn how, in your plugin, to change the text value of a selected text node in Figma 

Change the text value of a select node

Now you have your plugin built and ready it's time to publish it.

In this video, you will learn to publish your Figma plugin to the public

Publish a Figma Plugin

Figma is a web-based collaborative interface design tool that we can use to prototype the look and feel of our OpenGraph cards. We dive into a few of the basic features using [Ryan Warner's](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes) community [social branding templates](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes/status/1239578329340170240), such as text placement, using the eyedropper and color tools, as well as pulling in gradients as images to fit our working area.

* [Social Branding Template](https://www.figma.com/community/file/820337605519256142)
* [Gradient Magic](https://www.gradientmagic.com/)

Designing OpenGraph unfurls in Figma

Figma Auto Layout gives our designs superpowers. By adding auto-layout to our button component, we can change the text within the button while automatically maintaining consistent horizontal and vertical padding, just like we would in code.

Build an Adaptive Button with Figma Auto Layout

Keyboard shortcuts speed up our workflow, and make us aware of some features we didn't know existed. Figma has an awesome in app menu for exploring the keyboard shortcuts available to us.

Figma Keyboard Shortcuts

Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator written in Ruby. 

Requirements:
* Ruby version 2.5.0 or above
* RubyGems

Install the Jekyll Ruby gem on macOS quickly with just a few terminal commands and have a blog-aware site running locally.

Install Jekyll and Create a New Project

Blogging is built into Jekyll. You write blog posts as markdown or HTML files and Jekyll turns them blog posts. They follow a specific naming convention to be picked up and used by Jekyll

All blog post files require front matter. Front matter is a snippet of YAML at the top of a file. Front matter is used to set your layouts and meta data.

Create New Blog Post with Jekyll

Jekyll has a plugin system that allows you to add custom features to your site. There are many plugins available or you can even write your own. You can view a list of plugins at [Planet Jekyll](https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-plugins)

Liquid is a templating language written in Ruby to output to the browser 

[Liquid Documentation](https://shopify.github.io/liquid/)

Install a Jekyll Plugin

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

How to create an app icon from scratch, generate the required sizes, and add to your iOS app.

Image editing - [Figma](https://www.figma.com/) is a free online design tool used in the video. You can use any design tool you like, such as Photoshop, Sketch etc, as long as the output is a 1024x1024 .png image.

Asset generator - [Iconizer](https://raphaelhanneken.com/iconizer/) is a free mac app for generating the correct sized assets from your icon.

Design and Add a Custom App Icon with Figma to Your React Native iOS App 

Actions contain no functionality, but rather describe an event in our application.  In this lesson we will describe our Actions as they relate to our application.  These Actions will then be available for triggering in our Views and for execution in our Store.

React Flux: Actions

In Flux our Components are referred to as Views, but they are the same familiar Components associated with any React development.  In Flux, however, we have the benefit of the architecture to keep us from having to pass down through a long chain of children Components any functionality that may be embedded in our Stores.  In this Lesson we will wire up all of our Components in record time utilizing the architecture we've already established.

React Flux: Components/Views

Stores are where the real work in our application is done.  Dispatchers broadcast Actions to all Stores, and the Stores registered to listen for those Actions will perform any logic needed to update our Views.  In this lesson we will establish our first Store and register the Actions we wish to respond to.

React Flux: Stores

Our build process during this series will utilize both gulp and browserify.  In this lesson we will take a moment to setup our environment and all of the tooling required to begin developing our Flux Application.  We've kept the build process very simple so porting it to grunt should be a breeze, but this also serves as a simple primer for those who may not be familiar with gulp.

React Flux: Development Environment Setup

Organizing modules and components is a critical aspect of the development of any single-page web application (SPA). In this lesson we will look at refactoring the Flux React store into a more module structure.

React Flux: Project Organization

Flux has four major components: Stores, Dispatchers, Views, and Actions.  These components interact less like a typical MVC and more like an Event Bus.  In this lesson we will start by creating our Dispatcher which queues up our Actions as Promises and executes them as they are received.  We'll also create an AppDispatcher which, unlike the Dispatcher, is more specific to our application.

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