Figma is 4! Font fallbacks. Switching to Microsoft Paint.
Figma celebrated four years since its public launch by releasing a few important quality-of-life updates. Fast Company named them a winner of the Innovation by Design award for enabling other businesses to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Marcin Wichary wrote an epic blog post on font fallbacks, which is worth finding time for. Last but not least, Friends of Figma have a great curated collection of artworks and illustrations made right in Figma. Enjoy the issue!
— Eugene
Promo
Book “Designing in Figma”
My practical guide to Figma, showing how to create layouts that will evolve over time, build design systems at scale, and stay organized and efficient in the process.
App Updates
Offline Autosave
Figma now won’t lose offline changes you make even if you close your browser or your computer crashes.
Improved Reordering in the Properties Panel
“When more than one fill, stroke, or effect is applied to an element you’ll now see a draggable icon on hover, making it easier to reorder things.” A small but mighty update — it was really painful to drag properties before!
Updated Missing Fonts Dialog
Minor UI cleanup, but you can now select all text objects using the missing font.
Prepare for Variants
While feature introducing Variants of the same component is currently in beta, this help article provides recommendations on how to prepare for its release in November.
What’s New
When Fonts Fall
Marcin Wichary digs into how font fallback works. As always, his post is a deep dive into the topic. Highly recommend!
Four years ago today, Figma launched publicly for the first time
Did you know it was Figma’s birthday last week? I remember trying it around that time and not being impressed, but they’ve been shipping improvements and new features so fast that just in a couple years I switched completely.
Here’s how the CEO of Figma went from a computer science intern to the head of a $2 billion company that’s challenging Adobe for the love of designers across Silicon Valley
A great in-depth profile of Dylan Field at Business Insider.
Figma Is Proving to Be the Essential Design Tool of COVID-19
Figma is a 2020 Innovation by Design winner in User Experience category. Fast Company credits it, at least partially, with enabling companies to work remotely. “Figma has become the virtual whiteboard of the pandemic.”
Config Europe 2020 – Keynote Highlights, Dylan Field
If you didn’t have a chance to watch the full keynote yet, this is a short 6‑minute long video with main highlights.
Friends of Figma: Art & Illustration
Twitter account featuring beautiful artworks made right in Figma.
Using Figma
How to Design for Backstage (Even if You’re Not a Designer)
Backstage is Spotify’s homegrown developer portal. This article shows how to design for it using a combination of Figma and Storybook.
Level Up Your Design Documentation With a Design Deck
A new video and free Figma template from Femke. “Impactful designers are great at communicating design decisions and documenting design process. This is the deck to level up your communication and documentation process.”
Using Figma in the iPad with the Pencil is WHY I got the iPad in the first place
A regular reminder that if you’ve got an iPad, Figurative app and Pencil Pal plugin are must-haves.
Setting and maintaining consistent space between items with the new Auto Layout
Designer Advocate Joey Banks shows a preview of what’s coming in November. Can’t wait!
Intro to Using UI Kits
A new Figma tutorial from Headway, showing how to use Figma UI Kits to bring design ideas to life faster.
In the File: Building a Design System Around Collaboration, Not Components
It’s all too easy to focus your design system on the perfect component, missing out on the aspect that’ll ensure your success – collaboration. Join Zalando’s Louise From and Julia Belling to understand how they created, educated, and scaled their internal design system.
Figma Low Code – A New Way to Tackle Design Hand-Offs
“Figma-Low-Code is an open-source project that enables the direct inclusion of Figma designs in Vue applications. By ensuring that the Figma design stays the single source of truth, this approach reduces the need for design hand-offs and front-end code significantly.”
Why I’m Switching from Figma to Microsoft Paint
“Now that it’s been a while since I switched from Sketch to Figma, I thought I’d try going back to my first design tool, MS Paint. As there is so much debate on what design tool to use, I wondered why we ever moved away from such a great tool in the first place.” At first, I thought it was a late April Fools’ joke, but it’s quite amazing to see what changed and what remained roughly the same for 25 years.
Resources
Iconly 2 – Essential icons
500+ free vector icons in five different styles.
Lo-fi Wireframe Kit for Figma
A robust library of over a hundred wireframing components to faster explore more ideas.
Overflow
A service for creating interactive user flow diagrams and design presentations from Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD mockups.
Plugins
Autoflow
A major update to a popular plugin for drawing flows. Now the lines between objects auto-update on move, intelligently avoid obstacles, and clean up after themselves. Check out a Twitter thread by the author with more details.
GIF
A plugin by Rogie to play GIF animations in the editor (!), make memes, and export animated GIFs straight from Figma.
Table Creator
Create simple, flexible, and editable tables.
Backstage
The Many Dimensions of Trust in Design
Curated takeaways from Config Europe on the importance of trust amongst teammates, with clients, and in the broader design community.
Building an Open and Inclusive Design Process
More highlights from the conference on how to build trust. “Trust is the backbone of an open and inclusive culture, and the right processes — which govern how you design, develop, and work together as a team — can, in turn, result in more open and inclusive products.”
Inside Figma: My Time as a New Grad
Josh is an engineer on the design system team. Here, he shares advice for new grads as they think about taking the next step: choosing the right company, finding a role that fits their interests, and making the transition to the working world.