Issue #21 •

Figma Community. Config Europe. Hybrid remote work model.

Hi there,

I hope you found a way to have some summer fun this year in spite of the pandemic. My family and I just returned from a socially distanced vacation in the New York woods, and I’m ready to get back to work on the book. It’s coming along nicely, and I can’t wait to launch it!

Meanwhile, Figma rolled out its Community to everyone and opened registration to Config Europe, which will run virtually on September 17th. Also in this issue: best practices for building a design system from Lyft, an approach to file organization from Shopify, and engineering handoff process at Uber Eats. Don’t miss a fantastic macOS Big Sur UI kit and a thoughtful post from Dylan Field on moving Figma towards a hybrid remote work model. Enjoy!

— Eugene

App Updates

Explore the Figma Community

Figma Community went out of beta, and over the last two weeks was rolled out to all users.

What’s New

Config Europe

Registration is open! The conference is virtual and free, so don’t forget to register by September 10th.

Building a Design System Library

Jeremy Dizon discusses best practices that his team followed to create and maintain multiple Lyft Product Language component libraries in Figma.

Anyone else using spacers in Figma’s Auto Layout?

Can’t wait to see what they’ve got!

Using Figma

How we use Figma templates to facilitate collaboration at Shopify

Tobias Negele, a Staff Product Designer at Shopify, shares their approach and template for organizing files and creating a predictable structure that engineers and other colleagues can easily understand and navigate.

A simple way to keep track of your design iterations in Figma

Lennon Cheng has a simple approach for documenting design iterations in Figma: create a documentation file in every project without access to libraries, then at every pivot point copy your current screen and paste it into that file. Without access to libraries, all components and styles will be detached and won’t receive future updates.

How to Migrate from Sketch to Figma

A few tips and plugin recommendations that helped Brendan Ciccone migrate six projects from Sketch to Figma in less than one week.

Return to Instance after editing the Main Component

Meng To points to a useful feature that can be easy to miss.

How to add “native” Find functionality to Figma

Joel Califa suggests assigning a system shortcut to the Find & Replace plugin.

How to handoff your designs to Engineering

Femke shows her engineering handoff process at Uber Eats. Among other things, she adds a Handoff page to her files, breaks it down into work streams, uses templates to show flow statuses, and adds notes to document changes and implementation details.

Figma Tutorials for Beginners

The design team at Headway recorded a free course on the basics of Figma.

Resources

macOS Big Sur UI Kit

Another fantastic resource by Joey Banks, who also recently built iOS & iPadOS 14 UI Kit.

Favicon & Browser Mockup

Preview a favicon and a web clip image in different browsers.

iMessage Comments

iMessage-themed conversation kit for discussions inside Figma.

Apple logo in soft 3D

Nicely done. Duplicate the file to learn how it’s made.

The Car

Cool photorealistic illustration. Don’t miss a time-lapse video of the process.

Plugins

Arrow Auto

A very nice plugin for visually connecting objects with arrows. It even automatically updates the arrows when connected objects are moved around.

Backstage

How work is changing at Figma

Dylan Field wrote about moving Figma towards a hybrid model, where both in-person office hubs and remote work is possible. I found this part from their internal survey especially interesting: “…almost half of employees currently based in San Francisco said they would consider moving to another city within commute distance if we offered multiple WFH days per week. Nearly two thirds of employees said they would consider moving to a non-hub location before the end of 2022 if all roles had the option to be remote.”

Collaborate from Anywhere

“In the latest episode of Greymatter, Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field sat down with Greylock general partner Sarah Guo to discuss how the company has evolved to meet a surge in demand, and how he is approaching leadership during this time of great upheaval.”

React at 60fps: improving scrolling comments in Figma

Kiko Lam, an engineer on Figma’s collaboration team, shares her approach to the performance optimization project — investigating the underlying cause of slow performance, challenges with the existing implementation of comments, and the results of her work.

An open letter about my gap year

Abigail Africa, a Student Fellow at Figma, on deciding whether or not to complete her degree this year in the middle of the pandemic. ​“Dylan, who left college to start Figma, offered to bring in other perspectives alongside his own. We invited a small handful of people we knew would be thoughtful on the topic to chat with Dylan over Zoom: Laura Deming, John Maeda, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Weiner, Karlie Kloss, and May-Li Khoe.”

Features

Topics

Design Tools

Figmalion

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