"What is Frame 237?"

Figma names your layers for you: Frame 237, Rectangle 48.

Then someone else has to guess what they are.

That has bitten me three times.

1. The developers who asked every day

Early in my career, we handed designs to an external developer team, outside the company.

About 10 developers. No shared way to export from Figma.

Every day, 2 or 3 of them asked me which layer to export.

Different person, different screen, same question.

English was not easy for either side.

And Figma has several ways to export. Each gives a different file: the raw layer, or the complete asset I meant.

So I wrote a “how to export” page inside the Figma file, and sent them there.

2. The AI that could not read my layers

Then came our first AI prototype.

The AI could not read the unnamed layers. It did not know what to do with them.

I said “change the image here”, and it did not know which layer was the image.

Same problem as the developers. A different reader. (That project is note 07.)

3. The airline project

A huge, rushed airline project. About 8 designers, each working on their own.

Nobody named the layers.

The developers exported the images wrong.

And who answered all the questions? Me.

I was annoyed. Very.

What I tell my team

Developers read the names. Now AI reads them too.

So I always tell my colleagues: name your layers.

What changed

Once the layers had names, developers and AI understood the files better.

The exports came out more correct.

Talking to AI went more smoothly.

And nobody working with me had to wonder which layer is the image, which is the colour, which is the text.

Before you hand off

Six things you can do today, from Figma’s own help pages:

• 🏷️Rename what Figma named for you. Its guide for AI agents says to swap Frame1268 for a name like ProductImage, so the agent knows what the layer is. ⌘R (Ctrl+R) renames many at once.
• 📁Name with slashes, like Button/Hover. Figma groups related components by name, and exports follow it: button/pill/default becomes a file called default, inside folders button and pill.
• 📤Mark the export yourself: select the exact layer, click + in Export, pick the format (PNG, JPG, SVG or PDF) and the scale, like 2x or 3x for sharp screens. SVG and PDF export at 1x only.
• 🧩Know what each export gives. Export one layer and you get that layer alone: by default, whatever overlaps it stays out. A slice takes everything inside its box.
• 🔍Check before you send: ⇧⌘E (Shift+Ctrl+E) lists every export set up on the page, with its scale and format.
• 📌Write it down. Figma recommends a team agree on a naming structure and document it. Mine was a “how to export” page inside the Figma file.