A guest post in Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter by Figma VP of Product Sho Kuwamoto on the importance of feel, service, and staying close to customers. ​“Fast-forward to 2023, and Figma has grown beyond what I could have imagined. It’s gotten to the point where people often ask me for advice on how to prioritize features or how to run a product process. These questions are hard for me to answer, because I don’t think we do anything special. Our process is messy and we make mistakes. We create designs and then throw them away. We miscommunicate all the time and forget to write things down.”

A list of the top ten design systems from companies like Google, Atlassian, Microsoft, Shopify, IBM, AWS, Audi, Spotify, and Uber. Use them as an inspiration, a guide, or a reference to create your own design system.

Bruno Figueiredo, a Community Advocate for Figma in Portugal, came up with a fun community project — ​“lets all record our journeys from all across the globe heading into San Francisco. It doesn’t need to be perfect or look cinematic. Just grab your phone or camera and record the fun moments, the packing, the ride to the airport or the flight, the registration… all the little bits up until the moment the conference is about to start.” Can’t wait to see the end result!

If you do not plan to attend Config in person, Friends of Figma organizers offer regional watch parties to watch a live stream of the keynote and connect with the local community. A few of them are organized by Figma (Berlin, London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo), and many more a led by the community.

Jan Mraz with a short video showing a few Auto Layout tips. I keep forgetting that the canvas stacking option exists! No more weird hacks with rotating a container 180°.

Charli Marie with ten tips on how you can get the most out of FigJam.

Luis Ouriach made a starter kit for documenting your components and tokens on the Figma canvas. ​“With this method, we take a set of core styles (primitive tokens), and then ​“alias” them into tokens specific to components. It’s worth noting that aliasing is not technically happening, we are using the hyperlink feature within Figma to link from our semantic, component tokens back to the primitive styles within the same file.” Love seeing a Designer Advocate publishing a token starter kit a few weeks before Config 👀

A major update to a popular design specifications plugin. A new paid Pro version can now display Tokens Studio tokens within Anatomy, Props, and Layout sections.