COVID-19. Hand Tool. Remote work.
What a couple of weeks, right? The pandemic of COVID-19 makes everything else insignificant at the moment, but maybe this newsletter will give you a short break from the bad news. I hope you can stay home and work remotely to keep yourself and those around you healthy — tools like Figma make this more comfortable than ever.
— Eugene
What’s New
Designing Without Whiteboards: The Remote Guide to Product Design
This guide has (almost) nothing to do with Figma, but it’s a great resource about building remote processes in a design team. If your team went remote because of the lockdown, this is a good place to start.
New Release: Hand Tool
“You can now activate the Hand Tool with a click in the toolbar or by pressing H, as well as by holding the space bar. This lets you pan with one finger instead of two on laptops with touchscreens.”
Building a Design Systems Library With Figma & Scripter
Alex Lockwood from Lyft shares a few examples of how their team used Scripter plugin to build a design system library and automate tasks that would have otherwise taken hours or days to complete.
Automating the Boring Parts of Product Design
Brian Lovin from GitHub turned his Config talk into an article.
Sketch and Figma Have Been Doing Symbols Wrong — Proposing a New Way
A valid point that specifying an element as a component and then detecting all the places where it has already been used would be a great alternative to the existing approach of defining components before using them.
Using Auto-Layout Components in Figma
Aleksei Kipin shows how to apply the Atomic Design approach to creating Figma components.
Using Figma for Card Game Prototyping
“This is a guide for using Figma and Google Sheets to rapidly prototype card games. It includes links to the tools, an overview of the key steps, and links to templates.”
Awesome Figma Tips
A collection of useful tips on working in Figma faster.
Videos
Figma 101: An Introduction Tutorial
This tutorial by Charli Marie shows the basics of Figma — how it works, how to use it, and some tips and tricks to get the most out of it while you’re getting started.
Rogie King: Illustrating and Designing in Figma
Twitch broadcast of illustrating and animating a cute computer.
Vlog From Config 2020
A little glimpse into what Config was like from Femke.
Tweets
Sho Kuwamoto on the design and development process at Figma
Thread by Director of Product at Figma on how their team operates.
Figma: What does everyone else’s work from home setup look like?
Lots of neat workspaces. Also, there is a not-so-neat part 2.
Figma: What do you wear when you’re working from home?
Remote work is a sweatpants manufacturers conspiracy.
Rasmus Andersson: Cooling down after a week of remote work with the amazing Editor engineers at Figma
Pretty cool to see all the unexpected use cases for Figma that teams are coming up with.
Rogie King: Let’s build Style Guide Generator!
Designing an open-source project in the open.
Morgana D’Almeida: I tested Sketch competitors to figure out which one would be best at creating micro-interaction animations
Ultimately she went with InVision Studio, but her comparison and experience of using them is really interesting.
Community
Figma Design Team Trading Cards
A fantastic idea for larger design teams: “A tradition on the Figma Design team is to make custom “Trading Cards” in order to help us understand each others’ preferences and styles.”
Ex-Out Illustrations & Graphics
Free illustrations of topics of art, technology, people, objects, and education made by students at the RIT College of Art and Design.
U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) UI Design Kit
A design system built for the federal government.
The Chicago Design System
The City of Chicago published their public identity and design system. FastCompany wrote about it in more detail.
Plugins
Geometric
Use math to generate shapes and curves. “Choose from Polar Rose, Trigonometric functions, Polygons, Spirals of different kinds, Superellipse, Astroid, and modify multiple parameters to get complex shapes with ease.”
Fizzy
Make as many as 5,000 randomly placed circles, with your choice of colors.
Resources
DesignKit for Figma
Good looking and extensive starter template and wireframe kit.
From the Headquarters
Extend What’s Possible With Plugins for You and Your Team
Thomas Lowry, Designer Advocate at Figma, wrote a recap of a session at Config on building your own plugins to help you and your team work faster. Great examples and use cases from GitHub, Atlassian, and Uber.
The Dropbox Guide to Building Creative Culture
Michelle Morrison, Design Program Manager at Dropbox, turned her “Designing Culture” workshop from Config into a blog post.
Finding Confidence in Design Decisions
Linda Eliasen, VP of Design at Help Scout, shares some activities that can help build confidence when proposing a solution to a problem.