Renovate with Figma

If you're lucky enough to have your own home, or at least a flexible landlord, you may be familiar with the concept of renovating.

But renovations rarely starts with a sledgehammer. They start with a plan. And what better way to do that than in your familiar, everyday design software? Let's look at some tips for using Figma for interior and renovation planning:

Floor plan

I love using Figma for floor plans! My architect neighbors might find this silly, but hear me out.

Take some measurements of the room, decide that 1 pixel in Figma equals 1 cm (or inch) in real life, and draw it out.

Suddenly, you’ve got a custom floor plan, and a powerful tool for testing whether things actually fit. As long as both the room and the furniture are drawn to scale (1px = 1cm), you can play around with layouts, office setups, and all sorts of configurations, and instantly see what fits into your room.

Go treasure hunting online

The vast internet has loads of nice elements to bring your floor plan to life.

A search for “floor plan” on iStock or Creative Market will give you thousands of results, from useful building blocks (chairs, tables) to inspiring examples of how things can look.

Or check out Dimensions.com. It’s a massive collection of architectural objects: from iconic design chairs to… Jon Snow in vector format? Either way, ready-made assets are incredibly useful here and slot nicely into your Figma floor plan.

There’s also a Figma-inspired service called Rayon that’s specifically geared toward architecture and interior design. My first impression, after playing around with it for about two minutes, is very positive. Definitely worth checking out if you want to take your floor plans to the next level and have room for one more tool in your toolbox, although it does seem to be on the more niche side.

Moodboard

A good interior design process often includes defining a direction through a set of reference images. Commonly gathered into a “moodboard". And Figma is great for that as well.

Throw your reference images into a nice mosaic and set the image mode to Fill (not Crop) by option + double-clicking them. That way, you can stretch and reshape an image without distorting its proportions. This also works for several images at once, like when you select the entire image mosaic and resize it.

This very feature is something you can only dream of pulling off in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Flex some design muscles

Once you’re in familiar territory, why not pull out a couple of tricks from your day job as a designer? Use whitespace, pay attention to your design elements, be deliberate with typography, and wrap it all up in a Figma-based presentation. That way, you’ve maximized your chances of getting your colleague/partner/renovation buddy on board with your vision.