I hope most of you are settling into a new routine of working from home. If you miss human interaction, Figma just opened their Slack workspace from the Config conference to the public. Since the last issue Apple released iPadOS 13.4 with mouse and trackpad support that makes Figma almost fully-functional on the iPad, Dylan Field appeared at Jason Calacanis’ show “This Week In Startups,” and a few cool plugins were released. Enjoy the links, and stay safe out there!
— Eugene
What’s New
How Figma Helped Us to Scale Our Design Team
TravelPerk team shared their thought process and experience of switching to Figma. For them, it made collaboration much simpler, reduced complexity by moving from multiple tools to one, decreased cost, and made their designs embeddable and open for non-Mac users.
A Figma Library for Design Documentation
Tiffany Tseng built a documentation platform as one of her dissertation projects as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. After graduating and shutting down the service, she couldn’t find any suitable alternatives and ended up building a simplified version of it using Figma components.
Houston We Have a Problem: My Design File Is a Mess
Laura Escobar shares five key principles that prevent a design file from becoming the mayhem no one wants to use — using global styles, creating content structure, organizing layers hierarchically, reusing components, and following naming conventions.
Designing & Developing Useful Utility Plugins for Designers
Great examples of solving your own problems and annoyances with plugins. The author also shares some good thoughts on plugins’ usability.
Reconfig Slack Is Open to the Public
Figma opened their Config conference Slack workspace to the public.
Videos
Figma CEO Dylan Field at Jason Calacanis’ Show “This Week in Startups”
Figma CEO & Co-Founder Dylan Field shares insights on crucial moments in Figma’s creation, overcoming SaaS burnout, active vs. passive user-pricing, getting Greylock and Sequoia to invest after they initially passed, and more.
Remote Design Critiques
Design leaders from Figma, Apartment List, and Help Scout discuss how to set up remote design crits, offer some real examples, and share tips and tricks for success. Slides with Figma’s remote process are available on the Community.
Designing Microinteractions in Figma
Figmatch between illustrators Clare Freeman and Alicja Colon, hosted by Rogie King and Justin Mezzell on Twitch.
Designing OpenGraph Unfurls in Figma
The first video in Egghead series on building an OpenGraph image for social services using Social Branding Templates linked below.
Tweets
Figma basically works on the iPad now
iPadOS 13.4 with mouse and trackpad support is a game-changer.
Modern stalking
Uh-oh, where is privacy mode when we need it!
@rogie: Better way to swap a component
Drag-n-drop from the Assets tab is a time-saver.
@zyumbik: Implement “real” typing in the prototype
Gleb got on the challenge of implementing typing in the prototype using overlays, keyboard triggers, GIFs, and some magic. Absolutely impractical but fun nonetheless!
Plugins
Filter
Apply over 30 custom filters to raster images.
Flipbook
Create, preview, and export sequence animations.
SwiftUI Inspector
Copy and paste element styles from Figma files into the Xcode project.
Wave & Сurve
Create a variety of waves and interesting patterns.
Tracking
The plugin helps you create, attach, and update tracking annotations in Figma.
Resources
UX Flowchart
A large free kit with hundreds of vector cards, arrows, and elements for creating quick sitemaps, flow charts, and diagrams.
Design Toolkits and Samples for Windows Apps
Microsoft released design and UI-related downloads for Fluent Design and Windows apps.
Community Projects
Social Branding Templates
Template to quickly preview and generate a consistent brand image for all popular social services.
Remote Design Sprinting
Exercises inspired by the Design Sprint framework.
COVID-19 WFH/Homeschool Schedule Template
Easy to update and adjust to your needs as it uses Auto Layout.