Hot take: ​“Figma’s reliance on craftsmanship design culture feels vulnerable in a world moving toward automation & commodification.” I’m very curious to see what the big theme of Config 2025 will be.

Jake Albaugh talks about how modern browsers have evolved beyond what most design tools can do: ​“While many designers and developers have been working within familiar constraints, browsers have undergone a quiet revolution. The web now supports features like container queries, advanced scoping and inheritance, and responsiveness to user preference. It’s gotten much more sophisticated in terms of color, typography, dynamic units, layouts, and animation. Yet so many young designers and developers I talk to as a Developer Advocate at Figma aren’t aware of these possibilities. We’re still operating within old paradigms instead of pushing the boundaries of what the browser can do.”

In this deck, brand studio Smith & Diction explains their process and shares recent projects. You might be familiar with their brand identity for Perplexity, but my first exposure to their work was through local Philadelphia projects for Elixr Coffee, BOK Building, and The Rail Park. Ridd recently interviewed Mike and Chara, and it’s an inspiring conversation on craft, love of the game, brand strategy, and standing out in 2025 and beyond.

Alex and his team at Pixel Point make a cool YouTube channel with high-quality video tutorials on using Figma, Rive, AI, animations, and running a design agency.

Developer Advocate Jake Albaugh gives a mind-blowing tip on running Plugin API code inside Figma’s JavaScript console. Even while I built a couple of Figma plugins in the past, I didn’t realize how easily accessible this API is for day-to-day tasks. Definitely going to adopt this in my workflow.

Nick Babich shows how to create simple and advanced icons in Figma: ​“You will understand how to size and position icons properly in a frame, make the most of simple tools like geometric objects, and create and use key shapes to craft sophisticated icons. Lastly, you will learn how to export icons from Figma in SVG to use in your project.”

A new episode of Figma’s series Bridging the Gap, where Developer Advocate Akbar Mirza chats with Designer Advocates to understand and improve the process behind their collaboration. In this conversation with Ana Boyer, they discuss starting and maintaining design systems that work for different teams.

Disney’s Lead Product Designer Jeremy Dizon joins Designer Advocate Chad Bergman to talk about the underlying side of building, supporting, and evolving design systems.

My working file got really sluggish recently, and this plugin had the biggest impact on improving performance. The Downsize plugin by Alex Einarsson scans the document for images, then converts them to JPG, resizes, and compresses. It took a while to run on a large file, but memory utilization decreased by ~10%, and the file became noticeably faster to navigate.

It is worth noting that multiple tweets about poor Figma performance (see Oğuz and T. Costa) popped onto my timeline last week. Based on Figma’s replies, they’re looking into it, so a dozen large images might not be the only source of my problem.

This plugin populates your designs with meaningful content in seconds. Text content is available in 20+ categories and 45+ languages, and visual assets come with ready-to-use logos, avatars, flags, icons, etc.

A simple plugin to create print-ready designs directly in Figma. Instantly switches between units, shows object size, supports custom sizes, margins, and bleed guides, and provides convenient presets for standard document sizes.

FLOW library from Little Miss Robot is meant to be used for wireframing, but it can also easily be transformed into a small design system and evolve with your project simply by adjusting the variables.

First Round’s deep dive into how Figma Slides founding PM Mihika Kapoor transformed a hackathon project into one of Figma’s most anticipated launches.

Vincent van der Meulen, Design Engineer at Figma, talks about Figma’s approach of complementing designers rather than replacing them as a part of the SaaStr AI Summit panel. They follow four key AI principles: improve existing user behaviors, embrace frequent iteration, systematic quality control, and foster cross-functional collaboration.

After being at Figma from 2019 to early 2024 and seeing the company grow from less than 100 to over 1,500 employees, Software Engineer Andrew Chan wrote down some notes on what brought him to Figma and why he thinks it succeeded. He highlights two factors that created Figma’s ultimate moat — browser-first link sharing brought non-designers into the product, and their multiplayer technology was hard to copy for existing products like Adobe XD and Sketch: ​“I would guess that this was less of a ​“collaborative algorithms are really hard to implement” and more of a ​“existing products are really hard to make collaborative” problem: Framer moved to browser-based collaboration pretty successfully, but it did so by completely ditching its old product, while Figma-like design collaborative design tools created from scratch are pretty common these days.”

Another great point is on forming strong product opinions early on and crunching on them until they’re right: ​“One clear thing to me is that Figma’s astounding success in design was due in large part to the company identifying a gap in the design space and working on it essentially in secret for years. Folks like Rasmus and Sho formed strong opinions on nearly every aspect of the product-to-be, which we would spend the next few years realizing in fairly recognizable form. I will make this claim mostly without evidence, but suffice to say that many features like auto-layout and component variants had their bones laid out years in advance (although most newer features like variables were designed later AFAIK).”