Scoping and semantics. Chunk. Extrusion Effect
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App Updates
Mode conflicts
You can now select incompatible modes on layers, to make it easier to diagnose layers that aren’t able to use the mode (via Jacob Miller).
What’s New
Figma’s Creator Micro made me a macro pad person with its colorful, clicky keys
Figma sent a sample of its Creator Micro keypad to an Ars Technica reporter: “OK, it’s fun, I’m saying. It’s fun to have a little box for little computer tasks, rather than efficiently doing them all through one slab you must memorize under pain of being considered unoptimized. Sometimes I just twirl the volume knob up and down, with nothing playing, because it’s fun to twirl a knob.”
Using Figma
Are we too pedantic with semantics?
Luis wonders whether variables scoping provides enough semantic modification to justify removing explicit “background”, “border”, and “text” color variables. “What’s stopping us from maintaining a single, primitive set of variables, named as such (e.g. red-300) to match your developer’s framework, relying on scoping alone to bridge this gap?” (See the discussion in this thread on X.)
I also like this take from Nate Baldwin — primitive color palettes are inherently semantic because every lightness stop is knowingly created to be used for specific use cases. He supports this idea with examples from his work on Adobe’s Spectrum color palette.
Tips for working with comments
A few less-known and undervalued tips from Mal on working with comments in Figma. Personally, I had no idea that comments can be added to a selection or can contain images! I’d also suggest enabling the “Only current page” filter to keep a list focused.
Bind variables to variants
Chad shows how to use variables to change your variants on nested component instances when setting a mode.
Awesome Figma Tips
Short but awesome tips from multiple creators to work faster in Figma.
Figma Cheat Sheet
Common keyboard shortcuts for developers to perform actions like zooming, dragging the canvas around, copying the link to a specific screen, selecting the parent of your selection, exporting selection, and toggling a layout grid.
Made in Figma
“I broke Figma”
A super detailed illustration with complex lighting and textures by Mark Bennett.
Anatole Ayadi
Incredible photorealistic illustrations made entirely in Figma by Anatole.
Resources
Chunk 3 Icons
A new version of a beautiful free icon set from Noah Jacobus. Now comes in 3 flavors — Filled, Hollow, and Duo. All 300 glyphs from v2 were redrawn for consistency and 300 brand new icons were added.
Plugins
Variables generator
A new plugin from Designer Advocate Hiroki Tani for generating color variables from the palette on canvas. It creates a collection from the section name, modes from nested frames, and variables from rectangles.
Chartline
“Create beautiful chart lines with ease. Edit a randomly generated line to fit perfectly in your chart or choose one of the presets.”
Figma Autoname
It’s time to re-share this plugin to help designers fulfill a New Year’s resolution of naming their layers! It uses AI to rename layers and is free and open-source.
Extrusion Effect
It all started with Rahul Chakraborty’s question about a particular illustration technique used by Sketch in their blog. Two days later, Isaac Miller built the Extrusion Effect web app to generate cool extruded illustrations, and Anvesh Dunna turned this technique into a Figma plugin — hopefully, it will be available in the Community later this week. That’s why I love the design community!
Backstage
Techchat with Luis Ouriach
In this episode of the “Tech Chat” podcast, Luis shares his journey, shedding light on how he found his path to Figma and what it’s like to serve as a design advocate.