Learn Figma to design real app screens in ten weeks
Ten weeks at about an hour a day gets a beginner fluent in Figma's tools and able to produce clean, consistent interface designs for an app or website. Roughly 80 hours. Learning the tool takes two weeks. The rest is learning to make things look good, which is the part most tutorials skip.
10 weeks · ~80 hours · a small multi-screen app design with components, auto layout and a clickable prototype
1.Figma Design for beginners
Figma's own free course, a series of short videos with practice files. It covers frames, shapes, text, auto layout, components, variants, styles and prototyping by having you build a small app design from start to finish. Follow along in the actual file, don't just watch. Auto layout and components are the two features that separate people who use Figma from people who draw in it; replay those lessons until they click.
Free; Figma's free Starter plan is enough for this whole path
Figma Design for beginners →2.Refactoring UI
Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger's book is the best design education available for people who aren't designers. It teaches hierarchy, spacing, typography, colour and depth through dozens of before-and-after examples, each a concrete rule you can apply tomorrow. Read one chapter, then open Figma and redesign a screen of something you use badly. It's written for developers, which is why it's so specific.
$99 for the book; $149 with extras
Refactoring UI →3.Rebuild, then design your own
Pick three screens from apps with excellent design — Linear, Stripe's dashboard, Things — and rebuild them pixel-for-pixel in Figma using auto layout and components, not loose rectangles. Then design five screens for an app of your own idea, with a shared component library and a clickable prototype. Post it on Figma Community or show it to a designer and ask what's wrong. Take the answer seriously.
Free
Figma Community →If this doesn't fit you
If you want to become a professional UI designer rather than a capable one, replace steps 2 and 3 with Shift Nudge by Matt D. Smith. It's a long, rigorous interface design course built in Figma, with critique-style lessons. It's expensive — several hundred dollars — but it's the closest thing to a design school curriculum online.
Why this path
Most Figma courses teach the tool and leave you producing well-organized ugly designs. The tool is the easy part; Figma's own course covers it free and well. Refactoring UI supplies the judgement, and rebuilding great apps trains your eye faster than any original work, because you're forced to see every spacing and type decision someone better made. Designing your own screens only at the end is deliberate.