A Frame is Figma's container for a screen — a phone screen, a webpage, a card, anything with a defined width and height. Almost everything you design in Figma starts by drawing a Frame first, then placing content inside it.
Press F (or click the frame icon in the toolbar) and drag on the canvas. A right-panel Presets list appears with common sizes ready-made — "Desktop" at 1440×900, "iPhone 16" at the exact pixel size Apple ships, and dozens more — so there's no guessing what size a real device screen actually is.
A Frame behaves differently from a plain rectangle in one important way: content placed inside a Frame is clipped to its edges by default, and a Frame can hold Auto Layout (covered later in this course) to arrange its children automatically. A rectangle is just a shape; a Frame is a layout container.
Frames can contain other Frames — a card Frame inside a page Frame inside the overall screen Frame. This nesting is exactly how real interfaces are structured, and it's why the Layers panel from the previous lesson shows indentation: each level of indent is one more Frame or group deep.
Double-click a layer's name in the Layers panel to rename it — "Frame 47" tells you nothing three lessons later, but "Login Screen" does. Naming things as you go, not after, is the single habit that keeps a growing file navigable.