Images courtesy of Independent Designers Collective

Navigation is key within any digital interface. Smart Components enable us to create custom interactive navigation components that work perfectly with the rest of your prototype.In this guide, we will cover the concepts of nesting components, adding events to elements in a component using Event Variables, and passing these through your components. One of the main benefits of using nested components is that it provides full control over its states, such as unique hover states of elements within another component.

Framer allows you to create fully interactive and animated components, and even allows you to nest components within other components. We’re building a navigation bar component for a website that will contain two different kinds of nested components, with their own unique interactions. Our project will contain a Navigation bar that contains various nested components, namely five Nav items and one Shopping cart component. The design of our nested components, the nav list item and the shopping cart, will impact how we design our navigation bar. For this reason, an optimal workflow includes starting with the 'deepest' nested component and building up from there.