Grid updates. Domains in Sites. Don’t trust the process.
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What’s New
Don’t trust the (design) process
Jenny Wen, previously a Director of Design at Figma and now a design lead at Anthropic: “The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it. It’s knowing how to bend the process in your favor. It’s the sense to know how to keep making your work better. And it’s a clear, unwavering ideal of what good looks like.”
Ridd recorded an entire new video influenced by her article.
Figma Design
Improved control with new updates to grid beta
Grid improvements, offering more precision and control: delete rows and columns, set min and max, and adjust multiple grids with a faster grid picker. The Grid Playground community file was also updated with new features.
Animated mockups using Midjourney
Brett from DesignJoy breaks down the process of creating animated mockups using Midjourney and Figma.
Glass buttons
Tired of liquid glass yet? Sebastiano Guerriero shares a step-by-step process of creating a different type of colored glass buttons.
Figma Sites
Apex domains and custom subdomains
Figma Sites now supports apex (top-level, like example.com) domains and custom subdomains (like yourname.figma.site) so that you have more options for personalizing your URL.
Plugins & Tools
Kigen Color Generator
I wrote about Vijay Verma’s Kigen plugin in the past, but now he has extended it with a color generator for the web. It supports different color generation algorithms, naming patterns, and exports CSS, JSON, or Tailwind tokens.
Cool Thing
Animations on the Web
I purchased Emil Kowalski’s course on animation back in April, but started working through it only last week. Emil is a design engineer at Linear and previously worked at Vercel. The course is fairly technical and requires an understanding of CSS, JS, and React, but it does a really good job introducing Motion and explaining what separates good animations from great. It’s been very helpful as I’m working on a new personal website, so definitely recommend checking it out!
Backstage
Figma Heats Up Summer IPO Market Amid Software Listing Drought
Bloomberg: “Figma may ultimately be able to secure a valuation multiple of more than 20 times its annual revenue, said Matt Kennedy, Renaissance Capital’s senior strategist. With 13 million monthly active users, Figma generated $821 million of revenue in the 12 months ended March 31 and would top $1 billion of annual revenue this year at its current growth rate.”