On Tuesday, March 28th, 2023 at 9:00 AM PT, Figma will livestream the launch of 30+ little updates ​“that will be BIG improvements to your workflow”. The video teaser mentions the preview of blend modes and on-hover previews 👀 Sign up for a free webinar by their team of designer advocates and product managers.

Figma published their internal design team career levels and accompanying Skills Chart widget to the Figma Community! Last year they refreshed the leveling framework and Design Manager Sara Culver wrote a detailed post documenting this work. For additional context, I highly recommend Noah Levin’s thread on this project. Also, don’t miss their templates for performance reviews and calibration.

FTE is an open-source tool for creating an automatic communication channel between design decisions (represented as design tokens) and code. The main objective of the tool is to simplify the standardization and update of these decisions throughout all the digital products sharing a Design System. Its creator Daniel Casado shows how to install, configure, and use the FTE to transform design tokens (either as Figma styles or from Token Studio) into CSS styles.

The lack of precision in the gradient tool is an old annoyance, but as this tweet grew in popularity I’ve been quietly hoping that maybe the fix would make it to the Little Big Updates. Regardless, the replies provide a ton of smart workaround — distributing stops through double-clicking, nudging stops, using the Precise Gradients plugin, and even looking in the Inspect tab!

This way to monitor the use of system resources was around for a while, but it’s a nice reminder to check it if you’re working on a huge design file or a massive library.

David Hill shows how to make a nice 3D button with an active ring effect, applied in a way that grows with the button without changing the dimensions of the button.

Danny Sapio shares some great Auto Layout tips and shortcuts that can speed up your work.

Laura Reyes designed a free icon set in a linear style, and now working on animated icons.

A set of unique customizable mesh gradient blends.

Adobe announced Firefly, a family of creative generative AI models coming to Adobe products. The integration with Creative Suite and responsible generative AI is what makes it potentially very interesting. I also like that it’s positioned (similarly to GitHub’s Copilot) as a productivity tool and not a substitute for creators. For more context, see this thread by Sudharshan and another one by Linus with mind-blowing examples.