A year ago, I sent the first issue of this newsletter to 19 subscribers 🥳 I started it with zero expectations, but this year Figmalion affected my life in a meaningful way. I wrote a post about starting it, finding the audience (👋), getting sponsors, it’s role in self-publishing the book, and running it behind the scenes. Thank you for being with me this year!

— Eugene

App Updates

🛠 Override Improvements and More

A few quality-of-life improvements to components, team libraries, and the Inspect tab.

🐦 Rogie: 3 new features to ease communication with your developers

Rogie demonstrates a few recent improvements to the Inspect tab.

Variants, Part 2

📄 All you need to know to start using Variants in Figma

A short overview of Variants, when to use them, current limitations, and how to get started.

🐦 Styling the wrapper around Variants

One of the unexpected features, but can be useful when organizing your design system.

⏯ Office hours: Get started with Variants

Figma’s Designer Advocates share how Variants work and answer questions.

Using Figma

📄 Using Figma Community resources to design for Android efficiently

A design team at Mono took a dive into the Figma Community to look for high-quality Material Design and Android UI kits. They also show how to bring together components from all these kits into a project library. (Speaking of Mono, check out their free resources in the Community.)

📄 How we design our assets

A smart approach to image optimization. The loading effect in the result looks very nice!

📄 Mastering frame nesting in Figma

“Putting a Frame inside another Frame sounds like madness, but it’s a core prototyping technique required for true Figma mastery.”

📄 6 Steps to Make Excellent Blurred Background

This tutorial shows how to create attractive blurred backgrounds to get your designs ready for iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur. It’s not specific to Figma, but the advice is solid.

⏯ In the File: Governing your design system

Pinterest’s Ashley Seto and Fidelity Investments’ Taylor Cashdan and Mark Steinruck provide a behind the scenes look into their design systems and the operations that keep them going.

🎧 Figma for Education: Equipping Designers of Learning Experiences

An interview with Miguel Cardona, an Assistant Professor at RIT teaching New Media Design, on designing learning experiences in Figma.

🌎 Making layout grids work for you

An interactive article that aims to help you pick, set up, and use Layout Grid in Figma.

Resources

🌎 Neon effect

Beautiful effect, reminding me of Kai’s Power Tools. (If you know, you know.)

🌎 macOS Classic

The latest and greatest macOS UI kit!

🌎 mikeozornin/zeplin-and-figma-screen-download

Python scripts for simplifying design review and sharing design work. Scripts download updated screens from Zeplin or/and Figma to a new folder with the current date.

Plugins

Abstract

Whoa! I don’t use Abstract anymore, and it seems like this plugin requires access to a feature that wasn’t widely rolled out yet, but this is exciting. Abstract’s branch-based workflow is one of the rare features I see people genuinely miss when switching to Figma.

Design Tokens

Export Figma styles and custom tokens to Style Dictionary JSON or sync to GitHub. I’ve been thinking of building a plugin for this before, so looking forward to trying it on one of the projects.

Filter

Over 30 filters for raster images.

Oblique

Creates oblique projections of any shape. Useful for creating shadows, 3D depth, visual perspectives, etc. Really impressive!

Rename Paint Styles

Select multiple styles at once, and perform Find & Replace functions to rename them.

Backstage

🌎 Figma Brand Resource

Figma’s brand is really fun to look at. I didn’t know they have a special resource where you can learn about all of its aspects.

🎧 Design tools with Noah Levin

Noah Levin, the Director of Design at Figma, interviewed at Cells & Pixels podcast.

🎧 24: Noah Levin | Collaboration is at the Core of Exceptional Design

And another interview with Noah, this time at Things Have Changed podcast. “We talk about Noah’s early passion for design, his varied design experiences, joining Figma and building the highly talented teams making design accessible to everyone!”