The final week of LBU includes a number of quality-of-life updates.

The design editor. #22: On-canvas previews for the font picker (yay!) #23: Press Tab on a misspelled word to autocorrect the typo. #24: SF Symbols icons now render correctly. #25 and #26: Text boxes and containers (like frames and sections) can be used as snap targets. #27: Select text from the canvas in View-only mode. #28: A bug fix for the text shifts caused by changes in colors or text properties. #29: Nested component properties are visible in the playground and Dev Mode.

Collaboration tools. #30: Media in comments (yay!) #31: The full gamut of emoji reactions in comments. #32: Nominate someone to spotlight. #33: Mind maps in FigJam (whoa!) #34: Mobile app makes browsing files easier. #35 and #36: Importing Asana and Jira projects.

Prototyping experience. #37: A fix to ​“mouse enter” and ​“mouse leave” interactions. #38: The prototyping modal now pops up right when you need it. #39: Temporarily hide the edit modal by holding Shift. #40: Making it clear when you have multiple actions tucked into an interaction. #41: The inline preview can follow the current frame. #42: Sticky scrolling improvements (see more on this below).

Vice President of Product, Sho Kuwamoto, explains why quality-of-life improvements are at the core of Figma: ​“I don’t want to be at a company that only invests in things that will make headlines. I want to make a product that I feel proud of. The truth is, people do resonate with little changes, and we know that because we pay attention to our users’ individual stories. Plus, when you celebrate the small things and give each one their moment, it gives people a chance to recognize how important each one is.”

Config is back in Moscone Center, San Francisco on June 26–27, 2024 — save the date! Earliest bird tickets cost $175 (75% off!) and save you a guaranteed seat. Config 2023 was an incredible event, so I’ve already got my ticket and hope to make it back next year. The call for speakers is open until the end of this year and the next event will be focused on the five themes — building products, design craft, design systems, development and code, and innovation.

Figma published a report from the survey of 470 design professionals in Europe and APAC exploring whether changes in working patterns, collaboration, and relationships with other departments have left designers in a good place in 2023. ​“A key finding of this report is the rising importance of collaborative product design. Despite the challenges of remote work, a new era of product design is emerging, one that thrives on collaboration.” See also a shorter recap of the study at It’s Nice That.

Jordan Singer came up with another wild AI experiment — sketch or design anything in Figma or FigJam and turn it into a functional prototype with one click of a button. This demo is a great example — it built all the functionality correctly based just on a few text labels!

An insightful look into cleaning up and shipping a new version of a large design system. The team struggled with slow performance, unused properties, lack of official nomenclature of properties, and ​“ghost components” without sources. It took the design system team three full months to address these problems, but they’re in a much better place.

Evil Martians, the team behind the Polychrom plugin, shares lessons they learned while building it and how they incorporated traditional elements of computer science into their work, like algorithms, data structures, and tree traversal techniques.

Luis shows how to make slot components more useful by ​“outsourcing” the component composition to a main component, whilst still allowing for completely flexible content within.

“In Figma, scroll position defines how individual objects behave when you scroll past them. There are three types of scroll positions: scroll with parent, fixed, and sticky. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on sticky scroll and see how we can use it make our prototypes even more dynamic.”

A brand new plugin by Petr Andrianov for magnifying any part of your design for product documentation, training materials, portfolios, and much more. Looks great and very useful!

OMG! Figma window is streamed to GPT‑4 Vision, which then provides feedback on the fly narrated in the voice of Steve Jobs. Looking for a way to make this a part of our design crits.

Financial Times: ​“Adobe’s $20bn deal to buy Figma is facing a fresh setback as regulators in Brussels prepare to file anti-competitive charges against the companies, an escalation that signals the EU believes the acquisition will harm rivals in the digital design market. […] A preliminary assessment of the deal already revealed a ​“substantial lessening of competition” in the UK. In the US, the Department of Justice is reportedly preparing a lawsuit to block the transaction. Adobe has already indicated it is ready to deal with probes as regulators intensify their scrutiny of large tech transactions.”