Padding best practices

Question

I'm interested in hearing from other designers about how they go about padding/margins while prototyping. Particularly, when you are building semi-complex prototypes which have several tiers of nested frames and containers, it can quickly become confusing/cumbersome to locate the padding, or locating the frame which is causing a misalignment in the UI. Until now, I haven't given much thought to the frame where my padding is, as long as the final result looks right, but I figured there must be a best practice or pattern I could follow consistently to avoid this. I realize this might not be much of an issue if you work with a third party design system, but my company isn't there yet. Wondering which other designers:

A. Dont think about it much and do what I do, as long as the final result looks right, it doesn't matter.

B. Always place the padding in the highest-possible parent frame.

C. Always place the padding in each lowest-possible child frame.

D. Follow a pattern based on the contents of the frame. For example, never place padding in a text-only frame, and always place the padding in a frame which contains a boundary.

E. Something else.

Answer 1

If your company isn't at a Design System stage yet, that doesn't mean you can't design like you're using one. Create rules and guidelines as you go, standardize all the padding, components and behaviours you can and you're well on your way to your own design system.

So to answer your question I would go with D. I would follow a standard patter and if a pattern for my padding usage didn't already exist I would define it while designing.