Community updates. Design Technologists. Generating designs.
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Go from Figma to Webflow, faster
Convert your static designs in Figma to clean HTML and CSS in Webflow in just a few clicks — your styling, layouts, colors, text, and images transfer seamlessly. Install the plugin, copy/paste, then polish + publish.
App Updates
New Community pages layout
Nice update to the Community resource pages — a new image gallery, plugin videos, and picking a relevant category to better showcase what kind of resource it is and what it can do. Also, remixes can no longer be published as they were misleading when it came to the authorship of the original resources.
Download Payout Statements in the Community
If you have a paid resource in the Community, monthly payout statements are now available in your Community profile. Just click “View payout statements” under the “Metrics” tab to download a CSV of your earnings on Community.
What’s New
Design Gifts
Fons Mans partnered with Framer again this year for a new advent calendar of design gifts — everything from heavily discounted apps to free icon and wallpaper packs.
Figma Wrapped 2023
If only Figma was doing a Wrapped report at the end of the year…
Inside the Minds: Life as a Design Technologist
A new webinar is a panel discussion with Hugo Raymond, a Designer Advocate at Figma, and three guests: Karl Kech, Design Engineer at DuckDuckGo; Amber Feinerman, Design Systems at Netflix; and Pranathi Peri, Product Designer at Graphite. They discuss the evolving role of design engineers and technologists in the tech industry, career progression, impact, specialization, and navigating the gap between design and engineering.
Using Figma
Generating designs with AI
Teddy Ni, a co-founder of Magic Patterns backed by Y Combinator, shares an experiment: “We taught an AI some Figma designs of a documentation site. It can now generate similar sites using my own custom components on ANY topic I want, ALL within Figma I can also click on any frame and request updates 🤯”. (This reminds me of the feature in Visual Copilot that I wrote about in #136.)
Creating Light Rays
A quick tutorial on creating light rays inspired by Rogie and Vijay with the Noise & Texture plugin.
Deconstructing Interfaces: feyapp.com
Tutorial Tim dissects a beautiful Fey website and shows how to leverage developer tools in the web browser to extract CSS values and implement them in Figma.
Resources
Griddy Icons
A good-looking set of icons made for Figma and Framer, with a unique business model — pay once and request custom icons in the future with no additional charge. A free set consists of 100 high-quality icons.
Backstage
Adobe / Figma deal could harm UK digital design sector
UK is following in EU’s footsteps: “CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) provisionally finds Adobe’s deal to buy Figma would likely harm innovation for software used by the vast majority of UK digital designers.”
Not sure if the CMA truly understands what each of the apps is for: “The inquiry group has also provisionally found that Figma is a credible future competitor to Adobe in image editing and illustration software – and that the threat posed by Figma has driven product development in Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator applications, including new web versions. The inquiry group considers that if the deal went ahead, it would eliminate Figma as a competitor which would otherwise have continued to seek to develop its capabilities in image editing and illustration, thereby fuelling innovation and product development by Adobe.”
Jordan Singer at Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List
Congrats to Jordan Singer on making it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list: “Product designer-turned-entrepreneur Jorgan Singer founded Diagram, a startup that created web-based design tools dubbed “Magician” and “Genius” that used AI and text-based prompts to generate design ideas and suggest design recommendations. Diagram quickly gained steam among its 100,000 users before being acquired by $20 billion design company Figma in 2023.” For more of his story, listen to the “Building Design Tools” episode of the Design is for Everyone Podcast and a long list of ideas that he has built since 2015.
Deep Dive with Marco Cornacchia
Speaking of Diagram, Ridd interviewed Marco Cornacchia — the founding designer at Diagram, and now a product designer at Figma. “In this episode, Marco shares how he (accidentally) created a new trend of animated bento grids. And we also get a behind the scenes of what it was like being the founding designer of Diagram and ultimately getting acquired by Figma.”