Config speakers. Reducing complexity. Delete & Heal.
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What’s New
Config 2023 speakers announced
Figma announced a list of speakers at this year’s Config, and the lineup is absolutely incredible! It’s a healthy mix of design leaders, makers, and folks behind the product. The agenda is coming soon, but you can get an idea of what might be coming from these answers. It’s not too late to register for an in-person or online event!
The designer advocates team
Regardless of going to the in-person Config this summer, this is a great intro of the international designer advocate team. Here is the full list for you to follow — Lauren Andres, Hugo Raymond, Hiroki Tani, Julia Kestner, Mallory Dean, Corey Lee, Alexia Danton, and Sebastian Metel.
Using Figma
Figma, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Joe Bernstein on confronting the conflict between what’s possible in Figma and what’s practical: “Ultimately, my point here is that I over-engineered this component. Figma has the capacity to be much more than a design tool, and sometimes I use it to engineer a UI. Clearly I enjoy doing that, and I even get lost in the weeds to achieve a deeply technical solution. But design systems and asset libraries are just as much a user-centered design problem as any other publicly facing product.”
Debugging & refactoring a variant component
On a similar note, this thread by Luis is a great walkthrough of debugging, reducing complexity, and refactoring a tricky variant component. The core part of his approach is slicing everything up into composable parts.
Color-coding components
A good tip from Jan Toman on color-coding different types of components inside a Figma library, which allows everyone to identify the component’s source and set the right expectations from these components.
Double-clicking layer icons
MDS with a great shortcut of double-clicking on a layer icon to zoom into selection.
Ignore Auto Layout when dragging
Hold the Spacebar when moving an object to ignore Auto Layout.
A glowing glass effect
Fons Mans is back with a new tutorial on how to create a glowing glass effect in Figma.
Delete and heal for smoother lines
Lauren Andres discovers an older feature “delete and heal” to create smoother vector lines.
Micro animations in Figma
Lauren shows how to create a micro animation (also known as micro interaction) using a heart icon. These interactions add a really fun touch, and I love that the tutorial uses a heart icon from another tutorial by Miggi.
Sticky scroll
A quick demo of the sticky scroll feature introduced as part of the recent Little Big Updates.
New Figma AI Plugins
Punit Chawla showcases a few new AI plugins — Figaro, FontExploreAI, Aidentic, Cube GPT, QoQo.AI, AI Designer, AI Color Palette Generator, and Diagram. While many of them still feel like proof of concept rather than a daily tool, it’s really interesting to see the direction design tools are taking.
Resources
Designer Lynx
Designer Lynx is a resource hub for all things Figma and product design.
Bento — 2.5D widgets
A set of social widgets for Bento with a little extra depth from Double Glitch.
Plugins
Iconduck
“With this Figma Plugin for Iconduck, you can search through 300,000+ free icons, emojis, illustrations, logos, flags, graphics, and clipart to find the perfect vector or SVG for your project.”