Web Development: How to Fix Cropped Shadows or Overflowing Elements in Figma

Monday, August 17, 2020

How to Fix Cropped Shadows or Overflowing Elements in Figma

In this quick tip I’ll show you how to fix cropped shadows and overflowing elements that you sometimes get in Figma. This can be a common issue when you create a group, or apply auto-layout to specific elements.

Fixing Cropped Shadows or Overflowing Elements

Here’s a complete video version of this Figma quick tip. Don’t forget to subscribe to our Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel for tutorials, free courses, and more!

Begin With an Object

Let’s assume that you’re creating a button, and you add an auto layout to it so that the proportions can stay true even when scaling. Give it a color, and a sizeable drop shadow:

Then duplicate the button, select both versions, then apply an auto layout to the both of them.

Immediately you can see that the drop shadow has been cropped around the objects. It’s visible between the button, but nowhere else.

Here’s Why

When you create an auto layout group in Figma it’s done by making a frame from the objects in question. The boundaries of frames are clipped by default, so we need to turn that off.

With the objects selected, go to the properties inspector and deselect the Clip contents checkbox:

Problem solved!

Overflowing Objects

The same applies to overflowing objects. For example, these buttons are themselves within a frame. And if we want them to be visible beyond the boundaries of the frame we’d need to make sure Clip content for the frame is unchecked.