Remember when we used to have Artboards? I’m OK with the shift to frames. One day it will feel normal, but I do have one thing that I keep struggling with:
Say I have a fame that ‘contains’ all the stuff for an artwork, let’s call it a mobile screen. I suddenly realise that I need to make the main frame taller. In the old days I’d click the artbaord and scale it (ensuring ‘scale objects’ was unchecked). Nowadays when I do the same some of the things in the frame stretch, and some don’t.
What should I be doing to make sure I know what’s going to happen? At the moment I tend to select the objects that stretch and cut them, then stretching the not-an-artboard, then paste them back. it can’t be the right way.
Hey Caspian. You can easily resize a Frame without affecting its contents if you hold down the Command key and then resize the Frame, by dragging on its edge or corner.
Or if you want to type a specific size into the W/H fields in the Inspector, then click on the “Edit Bounds” button in the toolbar, and while in that mode, type in your chosen new dimensions.
There’s these two shortcuts, but you can resize a frame in the same way you resized artboards: just click and drag. The default resizing and pinning enables this (fixed width/height + top/left pinnings).
If you’re seeing that layers move or stretch, try this plugin: https://skt.ch/yRR8ex1 . Install it and run it in the document where you get the unexpected layer behavior.
In the first versions of Athens, layers from existing documents were imported as relative width/height, which causes layers to move or stretch when you resize the parent.
We fixed this in version 2025.1.3, but any files that you had already open would keep those relative with/height settings; but the plugin fixes that and any new layers you create will be fixed width/height