We've all been there: you open a figma file and you see the dreaded missing fonts dialogue box.

Well, the good news is that fixing missing fonts in Figma is easy and fast, and in this guide I'll show you exactly how to do it step-by-step.

Why do I see the "Missing Fonts" error in Figma?

Just before I show you how to easily solve this issue, I want to briefly explain what's going on when you see the missing font icon in Figma, so that you can avoid having this issue in your future projects.

When you see the Figma font helper icon it means that figma is having issues in finding the local fonts (aka the project fonts) in your computer, the ones that were used in that very figma file.

Since Figma is a great collaborative tool, as designers we can easily work on projects and share them with other designers in the community or team members of our organisation.

However, when working on a project you might have installed some custom fonts on your computer (Adobe fonts, for example), which another designer does not have installed in theirs.

And, once you send them your figma file with those custom fonts, unless they have them as well in their computer, they won't be able to access them and they will see the dreaded "install missing fonts" warning message in figma.

So, the easy fix for this problem is simply to give the other designer access to the font files and library that you used, but this can be tricky sometimes due to copyright issues or logistics. Also, there's other potential solutions, so let's continue..

How to Fix the Missing Font error in Figma

As we just mentioned, the first solution to solve the Missing Fonts error in Figma would be to simply give access to the other designer the fonts which we originally used on our Figma project: these are the fonts that are installed in our machine.

However, if they have installed the fonts on their computer, then you will simply need to connect them to the fonts library (see the end of the article for specifics based on your operating system).

So, click on the top right corner on the missing fonts icon to synch the font styles.

At this point, a dialogue box will open and it will enable you to replace the fonts in Figma. Simply substitute the font name of the ones that you would like to switch and once done press on Replace Fonts.

By doing this you are telling Figma which fonts should be associated with the missing fonts and you will fix missing fonts.

Download the missing font(s)

There is another option that you can consider, which consists in downloading the missing fonts in figma.

You can easily download free fonts (such as Google Web Fonts) by searching them on the web, and then install them on your computer in the fonts folder.

One note though is that you might need to restart Figma once the font file has been installed in your computer, so that the desktop application will recognise them correctly.

At this point you will have a zip file that will have the name of the font.

You will need to unzip it to see the font in all of it's variations, install it and, after you restarted Figma, you will be able to go through the procedure that we outlined earlier to sync and edit the downloaded fonts with the other default fonts that have been used by the other designers or users that worked on that figma file.

Troubleshooting: Corrupted type file

If you followed this entire process, but the installed fonts are still not displaying correctly, there is a chance that the font files are corrupted.

To fix this, you will need to source or re-download the original font and refresh the design tab of the figma project to see if this time around it will work better.

Troubleshooting 2: Quit and restart Figma

If this process is not working, another thing that you might want to do is simply to restart Figma (or the browser if you're using it on the web), and possibly your Mac or Windows too. Try again after doing this operation and see if you're still encountering the same issue.

Troubleshooting 3: Correct Storage Location

If the process is still not working, another thing that you want to check is the storage location of the fonts. In fact, based on the type of operating system that you are using, you will need to double-check on the following:

Linux: your local system fonts should located at “/usr/share/fonts” folder or $HOME/.local/share/fonts

Mac: your local system fonts should located at "/Library/Fonts.”

Windows: your local system fonts should located at "C:\Windows\Fonts"

Troubleshooting 4: Font weight name discrepancies

One of the potential issues that could arise is the font weight and font style discrepancies. This is very easy to solve, and it simply means that the fonts were mislabeled.

For example, a font that is a Helvetica Bold font being labeled as Helvetica Regular. So, please check that the fonts that you are using are being labeled correctly in the system, in order to avoid potential issues when synching them to figma.

Learn more about Design

We hope that this guide was helpful and that we were able to solve your problem. If you want to learn more about design please follow us on our social channels and read the other blog posts on our website.. see you soon!

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