Create repeating elements

While designing for web or mobile apps, there is often a need to define repeating elements or content lists. However, it can be time consuming to create these elements or update when there are design changes.

The Repeat Grid feature changes a group of elements to a repeating element. You can simply pull the element in any direction and the grid repeats. When you modify any style of an element, the change is replicated in all the elements of the grid. For example, if you change the image size in one of the elements, all images in the grid are resized automatically.

If you have a text element in the grid, only the style of the text element is replicated and not the content. So, you can style text elements quickly while keeping the content different in the grid elements.

You can replace placeholder text in a repeat grid by dragging a text file onto the grid.

At its core, a Repeat Grid is a special type of group. You can create a Repeat Grid by selecting an object or a group of objects and convert them to a Repeat Grid.

To ungroup the grid elements and work on them separately, select the grid and click Ungroup Grid in the Property Inspector.

You can access the Repeat Grid’s component elements by double clicking inside the group.

After you make your changes, exit the edit context by pressing the Escape key.

Adjust the padding between two elements in a repeat grid

To adjust the padding between two elements in the grid, hover over the gap between the elements. When the cursor changes to double arrows, drag to increase or decrease the padding.

Work with text in a repeat grid

You can use text in multiple ways in a Repeat Grid. You can either update each individual instance of a text object in a Repeat Grid, or you can choose to drag a pre-filled .txt document to a Repeat Grid and have the contents of the text file automatically populate the text objects in a Repeat Grid. 

• Update individual text elements in a Repeat Grid
• Drag a return-separated text file to your text object in a Repeat Grid

Update individual text elements in a Repeat Grid

Drag a return-separated text file to your text object in a Repeat Grid

You can replace the placeholder text in a repeat grid by dragging a text file onto the grid.

Work with images in a repeat grid

With images, you can build repeated patterns of objects, where the image fill of an object is repeated in a pattern that you define.

You can choose to create an image fill pattern by dragging images one-by-one into an object, or select multiple images and then drag them to an object on the repeat grid.

Replace images in a repeat grid

To replace the images in the grid, open Finder or File Explorer, and navigate to the location where you have stored the images for your project. Select all the images that you want to appear in the grid, and drag-and-drop them onto the target object within the repeat grid.

The older images are replaced with the new images, which are resized automatically.

Create interactions from a repeat grid

You can wire a repeat grid to other artboards in Prototype mode in the following different ways:

• Wire the entire Repeat Grid for a single interaction
• Wire a single element of a Repeat Grid for an interaction
• Create a group of elements within the Repeat Grid and create an interaction from the group

Wire the entire Repeat Grid for a single interaction

Wire a single element of a Repeat Grid for an interaction

Create a group of elements within the Repeat Grid and create an interaction from the group

You can also create a group of objects within your Repeat Grid, and then create interactions from that group.

Import content with repeat grid

Here is a sample video to get you started with repeat grids.