Holiday greetings. 2020 Design Tools Survey. Love Triangle.
Happy New Year! 🎆 Hope you had wonderful holidays and feeling excited for the new year. 2020 is finally over, so let’s hope things will get only better from now on. Here is an original song with holiday greetings from the team at Figma!
In this issue, see the results of a design tools survey, watch ​“Love Triangle” by Pablo Stanley, listen to podcasts with Dylan Field, and read how Discord is building open-source design tools. Don’t miss an intro to Figma Motion plugin, a tutorial on creating type scales, and the whole new section with artworks made in Figma. Enjoy!
— 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.
What’s New
2020 Design Tools Survey Results
Results from a fantastic survey of over 4,000 designers run by Taylor Palmer. Figma basically destroyed the competition in almost every category this year. Compare with the results from 2019 that I shared a year ago in Issue #3.
Love Triangle
Great skit by Pablo Stanley that made rounds in the community. Love how both Figma and Sketch played along and changed their names on Twitter for a while!
Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces
A new ​“The Twenty Minute VC” podcast episode with Dylan Field.
Dylan Field – The Growing Importance of Design
One more podcast episode with Dylan, this time in ​“Founder’s Field Guide”. This one covers the principles that Figma is built upon, the growing importance of design as the world moves from consumption to creation, and what it takes to recruit effectively.
Using Figma
Building Open-Source Design Tools to Improve Discord’s Design Workflow
I didn’t realize how many popular plugins were made by the Discord team and started as their internal tools! In this blog post, Daniel Destefanis shares their approach to building tools to prevent design debt, spend less time doing repetitive tasks, and improve the developer handoff process.
How to Make Ultra-Smooth Animations in Figma Motion Plugin
Pavel Babkin shows examples of creating UI interactions, adding special effects, and even animating basic game characters with the Figma Motion plugin.
The Ultimate Figma Resource Archive (2020)
A solid overview of the most popular plugins, tutorials, and resources.
Horizontal and vertical scrolling presentation slides
Cool demo by Figma Designer Advocate Luis.
Selecting objects with a transparent background
Smart workaround for selecting objects with a transparent background. I also like a follow-up from Gleb Sabirzyanov in the replies on ensuring that developers won’t implement this hack.
Figma Snacks
Playlist of 15 short 20-second videos about Figma by Pablo Stanley.
Figma Tutorial: Create the Perfect Typography Scale for UI & Web Projects
Mizko made a good tutorial on creating a type scale using a tool by Jeremy Church. Other videos on his YouTube channel are worth checking out as well!
Figma in 5: Tricks on Fire
In just 5 minutes, Rogie shares a ton of great tips in a rapid-fire way.
Office Hours: Scroll Actions for Your Prototypes
“Catch up on Office Hours with Niko and Aaron from Figma to level up on some new prototyping capabilities.”
In the File: Work Better, Together
“Unlocking collaboration is hard, especially for large remote teams. In this livestream, LinkedIn’s Renee Reid and GitHub’s Ash Guillaume share their insights and methodologies for creating collaborative and inclusive design processes.”
Geometric patterns made by a robot
Pablo Stanley explains how he used AI to create unique patterns for Blush.
Made in Figma
Dr. Belmont vs. The Disease
Probably the first game created with Figma from start to finish — illustrations, animations, and interactions. Mind-blowing and beautifully made project by Daniel Allen.
Soul
Beautiful illustration by Vijay Verma. (If you didn’t watch the movie yet, you’re in for a treat!)
Taylor Swift
By Bonnie Kate Wolf. Don’t miss the textures she used, as shared in the replies.
Faux latte render
Another beautiful illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf.
The Mandalorian
An artwork by Robbie Smith.
Community
Crazy Field Builder
A good starting point for creating an input field with a ton of variants.
Plugins
Variable-Width Stroke
The plugin adds support for variable-width strokes. Made by Evan Wallace, a co-founder of Figma. (Hopefully, this is just a sign that native support is coming to the app soon!)
Figma Manager
A Figma version of a popular Sketch Manager plugin for tidying and organizing files.
Backstage
Inside Figma: A Case Study on Strict Null Checks
“At Figma, we believe in continuously investing in product quality and developer productivity by looking at recurring types of bugs and addressing them in a systematic way. A few months ago, our engineering team completed a large effort that achieves both: turning on the strictNullChecks compiler flag for our front-end TypeScript codebase.”
Redesigning Dropbox’s Ways of Working
Dropbox went fully remote last year, and in this post, they discuss changes to the workflow. ​“After migrating their design organization to Figma from Sketch back in 2018, the Dropbox design team had a head start when it came to remote collaboration. The team already had established best practices for virtually every stage of the creation process — brainstorming, wireframing, prototyping, and commenting. […] But once the pandemic hit and the team went fully remote, they needed to do more.”
Learning How to Love Work Again, with Figma
Figma profile by Index Ventures, with insights from Sho Kuwamoto and Dylan Field.