Jenny Wen ​“templatized” some of the frameworks she’s been using over and over again in her role as a design manager and pillar lead of FigJam. There are 11 FigJam (no surprise!) templates for strategy, managing, and meetings.

A large profile of FigJam AI in Fast Company. ​“Figma’s AI ambitions are clear. Singer noted that ​‘we really do think of AI as playing a central role across the entirety of the platform.’ In theory, that could mean not just better meetings, but more capable coworkers. ​‘In a collaborative environment where you’re working with many people on a project,’ Singer says, ​‘AI really up-levels everyone.’”

That’s a pretty useful desk mat! It’s still worth investing in learning shortcuts while we’re waiting for the Figma Creator Micro keyboard. Made by Ratsuns.

Rafal Tomal wrote a simple guide for non-designers like content creators, copywriters, marketers, and others who want to be able to create quick graphics on their own without learning all the advanced Figma features: ​“At the end of this guide, you’ll know how to create your own file in Figma, set up the frame (the artboard for your image) at the size you need, add some text and images, and export it to PNG or JPG.”

A cool tutorial on creating an animated card background using Rogie​’s popular Noise & Texture plugin — fast-forward to the end to see the final result.

Ridd recommends including little nav menus in high-fidelity prototypes so that viewers can easily inspect the different states of a page. Great advice and something I’m going to introduce to my prototypes!

Molly Hellmuth suggests building small design habits in a new year that will make future you grateful — sticking to one naming format, avoiding groups, adding thumbnails to files, naming all your layers (good luck!), and unifying the name of your icon shapes.

Miggi celebrates his 3rd anniversary at Figma (congratulations!) by demonstrating how to make a color wheel. (A coincidence, but just earlier this week I was making the same color wheel with a very similar technique!)

Miggi goes over all of the basics when getting started with variables and modes for your design layouts. ​“Explore what it takes to use variables to create a dark and light mode experience, change the density of your spacing, vary the languages your design UI can accommodate, and so much more.”

Using variables to create a night and day version of the same illustration. Love this approach!

Multiple icon collections by Zlatko Najdenovski, including a few free ones. Most of them are very expressive and unique.

“From lifelike portraits to objects and animals, craft any image you can imagine in just 5 seconds.” Won 2nd Product of the Day at Product Hunt on December 14th, 2023.

An interesting new plugin — get the AI design feedback on either the UX or UI of your mockups. I tried it on an unfinished design, and while some points were somewhat irrelevant, others were spot on. It’s free to play with and worth giving a shot.

A similar concept, but inspired by the Lighthouse web dev tool. This plugin ensures your designs are ​“polished and stakeholder-ready every time, saving you from potential revisions and boosting your design confidence”. 3rd Product of the Day at Product Hunt on December 26th, 2023.

A new plugin to generate free vector globes — spin the globe in the plugin window to update the frame, and then you can customize the result, tweaking colors for countries and more.