Boards

Boards is an app like the others: it stands on the bar when you put it there, and it is always on the Apps page. The page lists every board, the most recently changed first, each with when it last changed. New board starts a blank one and opens it.

A board’s page is the canvas under a thin header. The tools along the top are a whiteboard’s: selection, a hand to pan, rectangles, diamonds and ellipses, arrows and lines that stay attached to the shapes they join, freehand drawing, text, pictures and an eraser. A sticky note is a rectangle with text in it; the colours are on the panel at the left when a shape is chosen. Scroll to pan, pinch or hold Ctrl and scroll to zoom. The menu at the top left holds Save as image, Clear canvas, the background colour and the editor’s own help with its keyboard shortcuts.

The name in the header renames the board on a click; Enter keeps the new name and Escape leaves the old one. On the list, a right-click or a long press on a row opens its menu, with Rename and Remove, which asks first. A board with no name is called Untitled board. Boards at the left of the header is the way back to the list.

There is no save button. A moment after each change the board is sent to your account, and the word at the right of the header says where things stand: Saved, Saving…, or Not saved with the reason under it. Leaving the page in the middle of drawing sends what you have on the way out.

What is kept is the drawing: the shapes and words on the board, the background, where you left the view, and the pictures the board shows. A board grown past 16 MB with its pictures is refused with that sentence, and the last drawing that fit is the one kept. Panning and zooming alone do not cause a save; they are remembered with the next one.

Goals & tasks at the right of a board’s header opens a tray beside the canvas with the account’s open goals, then its open tasks, each with its area. The field at the top narrows the rows to the words typed, matched against the name or the area. Drag a row onto the canvas and it becomes a card where you let go: a box in the drawing with the record’s name, in the colour of its life area, the same colour the area has everywhere else in the app. A goal’s box has the heavier line, a task’s the lighter. A click on a row puts the card in the middle of what you are looking at instead; when a card is already there, the new one sits a step down and right of it. The tray stays open or closed as you left it, in this browser.

A card is part of the drawing like any shape. Move it, join it to other cards or notes with arrows, change its colour, undo it, and it is saved with the rest. Choose a card and the link mark appears; the link opens the goal’s or task’s own page in the app. A record can be on a board as many times as you like: drop it again and there is another card. Once it is there, the tray says On the board under its row.

The words and the colour on a card follow the record. Opening a board redraws a card whose goal or task was renamed, puts a check mark before one whose record has since closed, and recolours one whose area was given a new colour, with its arrows still attached. Closed goals and tasks are not offered in the tray; their cards stay on the board until you remove them.

If a board is already in FigJam, Add a FigJam board on the Boards page takes its share link and lists it with the others, marked FigJam. In FigJam, share the board to anyone with the link first; Figma’s embed shows only files shared that way. Paste the link from Share in FigJam and press Add. A link that is not a FigJam board’s is refused with a sentence.

Opening it shows the board through Figma’s own embed, which is view-only: you can pan and zoom, and drawing still happens in FigJam. That is as far as Figma lets an embed go, which is why the app has boards of its own beside it.

Boards appears on the phone’s Apps page and can stand on its bar, and its screen says that a board is drawn on a wide window. A phone browser says the same above the canvas. Open LifeOps on your computer to draw.