The community file is my favorite way to learn about and see demos of all 32 Little Big Updates.

If you missed the livestream (or had trouble joining the Zoom webinar), check out this recording of the event. Lively and exciting presentation by the Designer Advocates team!

I love reading about how design decisions are being made! This story shares a few anecdotes from the designers and engineers behind the current shipment of Little Big Updates, including multi-select search, background blur in prototypes, on-canvas previews, and hanging punctuation.

A beautifully presented shortlist of 11 out of 32 ​“little big updates”.

See also Molly Hellmuth’s top 10. Below is my personal shortlist, which is a little different.

The timing of this release is impeccable — just a couple of months ago WebKit added support for leading-trim CSS property to Safari Technology Preview (although other browsers are not rushing). For a deeper dive into why it’s important, see Leading-Trim: The Future of Digital Typesetting by Ethan Wang from Microsoft.

My guess is we’ll see hanging punctuation in the wild more often now. (Good luck, developers.)

While color and layer blend modes have the most noticeable previews, this update is a part of the larger initiative for adding previews to all settings. Previews were already added to Effects, and the team is considering supporting boolean ops, component props, and the font picker.

“You can now more confidently approve library updates with a visual preview of the changes and the ability to apply them to individual instances and layers.” I don’t even know how I’ve dealt with the stress of accepting library changes sight unseen in the past.

Honestly, I always assumed that SVG bugs are just a part of the game and will always be here — not a surprising conclusion when 49% of imported SVGs relied on buggy features. In retrospect, it was a silly assumption considering SVG is one of only a few open vector formats. In this fantastic thread, Figma engineer Lauren Budorick shows how much work went into detecting, analyzing, and fixing these bugs. I didn’t realize that luminance mask support was a part of this work as well, and Miggi is already exploring creative applications for composited motion visuals in prototypes.

Component properties v2 are out of beta with the ability to bubble up and expose properties of nested instances. It’s also now possible to define a list of preferred instances for swapping. Great for selecting a subset of a larger icons library or working with card components.

Now you can align layers with layers inside a component instance. Check out the thread by Tom Lowry and don’t miss his detailed spec for different scenarios!

Nice! Markdown FTW.

I hope this is the first step to batching all comments into a daily digest for lower-priority files 🤞

While I don’t often prototype interactions, I love the demo of all the use cases in this thread by Ana Boyer! Engineer Jediah Katz is also dropping some tips and tricks and Zander Whitehurst made a cool demo. Don’t miss the sticky scrolling playground file as well.

Is this an important update? No. But is it fun? Hell yes! The FigJam team keeps delivering the most delight per buck.

For this April Fun Day, Figma added a snake game to a Section tool inside FigJam. I don’t expect it to be around for too long, so give it a try if you can! See also a thread from Mihika Kapoor on how the team came up with the idea and built it.

Edward Chechique shares some ideas for AI features that he hopes to see at Config 2023.

Cool open-source proof-of-concept, related to the above post by Edward. For now, I’m skeptical of AI-generated components (explaining ideas and details may take longer than building from scratch), but bullish on offloading mundane tasks, error detection, and quality checks to the AI.

Discord designer Daniel Destefanis built an internal plugin for generating entire conversations using ChatGTP and rendering them using their design system. This is an excellent example of automating a mundane part of day-to-day work with AI.

Denislav Jeliazkov tested more than 500 plugins and collected a list of 102 that he keeps coming back to.

In this talk, Marco Krenn will show you how Fluid Interfaces and Typography enhance your Design System, from Static to Dynamic.

“FigGPT is a tiny plugin that connects ChatGPT to Figma and helps you to compose and edit copy.”

Some folks were upset when Figma added tables to FigJam because pasting data from Google Sheets was used to create a set of sticky notes. This plugin brings back this behavior by letting you convert tables to sticky notes.

Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma, shares why she believes anyone can become a skilled talent evaluator, her best interview questions, and how Figma leverages transparency across the org.

Every time someone posts pictures of Figma’s SF office, I’m blown away by its beauty and creativity.