How to password protect Figma designs using Crypto

Video Transcript

Today, I’m going to be showing you how to password protect your designs in Figma using a Figma plugin called Crypto.

The first thing we want to do is install the Crypto Figma plugin. To install it, go to the Figma icon in the top toolbar, click on that, and then go down to “community”, clicking on “plugins”, go to the search bar and type the word “Crypto”, and you’ll see it pop right up. I’ve already got it installed on my computer, so if you haven’t installed it yet, you’ll be able to click on that little button there and it’ll change the state to say “installed”.

Now that we’ve got the Crypto Figma plugin installed, we can jump back to our Figma file. I’m using a freelance website design from one of my friends, and I basically want to share this design with other stakeholders securely; and I want to be able to do that by adding a password. The people I want to share it with might not actually have a Figma account and they might just want to look at it really quickly using a link and not have to sign up to Figma and create a whole account.

If you just right-click and go to “plugins” and go down to “Crypto Password Protection” and click on that, this will fire up the Figma plugin that we just installed. The first thing to note is that we haven’t run this plugin before, so the first thing that’s going to show up is a representation of all of our frames in our design. They all pop up to mirror the layers that you already have in your Figma design and so what this lets us do is we can select all the designs that we want to put into our password protected Figma preview link. In this case we can select as many as we want, but to give you a bit of a demo I’m just going to select the first frame which is the “projects” frame and I’m just going to click the “Securely Share Designs” button.

What this is doing is it’s basically creating retina images of all of your designs that you’ve selected and it’s creating an encrypted password protected link and securely uploading these images to very secure Google Cloud Storage.

Once it’s finished uploading we’re going to see a link and we’re going to see a password pop up. Let’s just give it a second, this will vary depending on how big your designs are but it’s finished uploading now, so you can see that the secure link is now ready. What we can do is we can either copy this link here or click on it, so if we click on that link it’ll open up in the browser or we can go down here and click on this little icon to copy the secure link and that will copy it to my clipboard. We can also do the same thing for the password field, so this is really handy for easily getting these details to share over email or Slack or any other method that you want to use to share these details with stakeholders. We can copy the password here, I usually click on that icon just to get the password and then I just jump up there and click on this link here, which will open it up in the browser immediately.

This is what the login screen looks like, this is the screen that you’ll be presented with when you share this link or if you open that link yourself. We’re just going to paste our password in that we just copied using CMD+V (or CTRL+V if you’re using Windows) and now that we pasted that in we can click on the “login” button. If we click that, that’s going to authenticate us… and we’re logged in. You can see that the design we were just looking at in Figma has been securely uploaded to this password protected link. We can scroll up and down the entire page, and a couple things to note is we’ve got a timestamp, so that’s going to show us how long ago the design was uploaded, this title here is getting pulled in from Figma, so that’s the actual page name or the project title or document title. This little text down here where it says “projects”, that’s just getting pulled in from the name of your frame, so whatever you name the frame in Figma, that text is going to show up as down there.

This is the most basic example of using Crypto but if we jump back to Figma let’s just close Crypto and we can rerun it. We can relaunch it from the sidebar over here because we’ve actually already opened it using the right-click menu before, so you can use this little shortcut over here to open it directly.

Okay, so this is the second time that we’ve run Crypto. You’ll notice things look a little bit different; first of all it has remembered our selection from the last time and the buttons have changed or have been added, so instead of just saying “Securely Share Designs” we now have “Upload New Version” and “Update Last Uploaded Version”. The primary button is to upload a new version and the secondary action is to update the last uploaded version. The last updated version will essentially update what we just uploaded the previous time we ran Crypto, so you can essentially override your design that you just uploaded whatever you just uploaded to that first version this will override that; the link will stay the same but the design contents will get updated. I’m actually going to do that now, just so you can see what it looks like. I’ve just added the “about” page and clicked the “Update Last Uploaded Version”. So, what this is going to do is create retina images from the two frames that we just selected, securely upload them and encrypt them, but that link is not going to change; the link will stay the same and the designs will be updated. This process is very similar to what you might have used with a tool like InVision or something like that, but this is a really good InVision alternative because it works directly with Figma and it’s a much lighter way of password protecting Figma designs; you don’t have to opt-in to the whole InVision ecosystem just to use it with Figma; Crypto has been built from the ground up just to securely share password protected designs directly from Figma.

Almost there, it’s just uploading the retina version of the about page. Once this is done the link will look exactly the same as the one that we just had before. You can copy the password again if you need to but we’ve got our link here and you’ll be able to see in a second that we can compare this link and it’ll look exactly the same as the one we’ve got before. I’m just going to jump back into the browser because we already have the page open where it’s still authenticated; I can just refresh it and because we’ve updated that design refreshing it reloads that URL and you can see here that even though the URL is is the same the designs have been updated; it remains unchanged compared to before but there’s a few things that are different since the last time we looked at it one is that the timestamp has been updated saying that we uploaded it two minutes ago and down here we have this brand new navigation bar which we didn’t have before and it’s got one out of two; it shows us that we’ve got projects and the about page now and we can click on those thumbnails as I’ve just done to navigate through the two pages that we’ve uploaded; that was a really easy way just to quickly update the last uploaded version of the design you might have already shared it with somebody and just wanted to quickly update it; yeah clicking on these arrows will also switch between the frames if you don’t want to use the the little nav bar at the bottom and the keyboard left and right keys will also do that or you can click and drag as I’ve just done; as you can see we can just jump between those really really easily using the navigation bar will give you a really nice overview of all the frames you’ve added; if you’ve got a lot more you can get a really quick sense of every that’s in the project and quickly jump between them without clicking left and right a hundred times.

Back in Figma, I just want to show you a couple more things. Let’s relaunch Crypto from the sidebar, and now that we’ve done that experiment, I just want to explain a couple more things. The first one is this little icon up here; this little padlock which wasn’t there the first time but it’s there now, if we click on it we’re going to get a little pop-up that looks similar to the confirmation message that you had after uploading. It just gives you an easy way to copy the password and copy the link without having to get to the end of the process every time. If you’ve forgotten the link or you just want to quickly copy it to send to a co-worker or a stakeholder, jump in here and click that button for password or the URL, and that’s just a really quick way of jumping back to your preview.

Now that we’ve got those details we can jump back in to our main window here and these little icons that I’m looking at now they haven’t been used before but they essentially allow you to drag and drop the reordering of the frames; if you want to have the the about mobile page added in; we’ve got three now but let’s say that this new mobile design is much more important than the project’s page for this new version we want to upload what I can do is drag that projects file down and this is going to actually push the projects page down to the bottom and we can elevate the mobile about page to the very top because that’s what we want to highlight in the new version that we’re gonna add; it’s really easy to reorder these layers they’re super easy and smooth just to reorder and you just click and drag click and hold the mouse to her and set that order; now we’ve set this order we’re not going to click the “Update Last Uploaded Version”, this time we’re actually going to click this other button which is “Upload New version”; clicking on that now.

Just to explain what this does, it’s essentially going to create a brand new version, as Crypto supports versioning instead of just having one link that gets over in every single time, which we can do (as we just saw) but I know from experience, working yet certain companies and design teams that you want to have multiple versions of the same file. The reason for that is if you make substantial changes you want to go back and easily swap between them to compare the differences, Crypto will actually create a brand new secondary URL which means that people who already had the last URL that we just generated they’ll still be able to see that design without without any problems. We’ll also be able to send this new link around which will link to the new version directly but both of those links will let you switch between the versions on the fly; you’re essentially getting versioned links that are super helpful to deal with multiple stakeholders, that that comes in really handy.

I’m going to show you what that looks like in a second, the designs have finished uploading and you can see here that the URL is slightly different the the characters in the last URL extension was slightly different, this one has generated a brand new subpath in the URL. If I just copy that URL and jump back to our browser, and because I’m still authenticated, I can actually just paste that in over the top of our old URL here. I’ll paste that in, jump to that; we’re still authenticated and we can we can still see it. If we were to close that tab and reopen it in a new tab, we’d have to login again; and that’s just a way to force security, so it doesn’t make people logout manually, it’ll just keep the authenticated session isolated to each tab which is really neat.

As you can see, it’s slightly different with our new link in here. First of all, you can see that we’ve got version 2 added into our little heading bar and the timestamps have been updated as well. You can see this is a new version and the title is now a clickable title, because we’ve got this little arrow and little hand cursor; we can click on it switch between versions. Version 2 is the current one we’re looking at, but we can go back to version 1 and that’s going to load up the version that we were looking at a few minutes back; it’s telling us that it was uploaded 9 minutes ago, which was the one that we just uploaded a minute ago, and we can immediately just switch back to version 2 with one click; you can see the mobile feature that we’ve got at the first frame, flick through the other reordered pages and we can see our entire mobile design as you’d expect, the larger design works perfectly, and down here now we can we can see we’ve got 3 items instead of the 2 from before, and and they’ve been reordered to the order that we set back in our Figma plugin in the Crypto plugin.

If you wanted to you could re update the order again. If we wanted to update that version that we just uploaded once again, because we made a mistake or something, and “projects” was actually meant to be at the top and we didn’t realize, then you don’t have to create a new link every time if you’ve already just shared that link before you realize you made a mistake, then you want to make a design update you don’t have to give them a whole new link. You can just let them keep that link and click this “Update Last Uploaded Version” button and then that will basically update version 2 to reflect all those changes, but you can obviously use the “Upload New Version” button as well. That will give you a new version which will have version 3 in there, but for now we’ve just got the two versions.

That’s essentially what using Crypto is like in Figma at the moment. I’ve shown you how to use it for creating static designs or static previews of frames but this interface will evolve in the next version of Crypto to support prototypes as well. Instead of swiping from left to right between frames, it’s actually going to support clickable hotspots and transitions from Figma and create secure password-protected Figma prototypes that you’ll be able to interact with directly in the web browser and share that around securely as a password protected link. For now, we’re just supporting the static designs, very similar to what you would see in a standard InVision share link, but I think this is just a really lightweight great integrated alternative to using InVision with Figma. Figma doesn’t really play nicely with InVision, so Crypto is a great option if you’re looking for an InVision alternative or just want some simple password protection in Figma, because that just doesn’t come with the native Figma experience.

I hope this has been a helpful tutorial for you if you’ve been trying to figure out how to password protect your Figma designs and get away from the InVision workflow or the standard Figma sharing workflow. I’m looking forward to doing the next tutorial with prototyping once that’s ready to go, but until then, as always, thank you for watching.