Branching, Config reflections, designing FigJam
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
Introducing branching: space to iterate and explore freely
“Today, we’re introducing branching in beta to better enable collaboration at scale. Designers will have the space to iterate and explore freely, while preserving shared files as a single source of truth. Product Manager Meagan Gamache shares a peek into the 13-month journey to beta and what this means for design system management in Figma.”
Branching in Figma
Figma Designer Advocate Chad Bergman shares best practices for using branching.
Multiple prototype tabs in the desktop app
No need to use Chrome for comparing prototypes between pages anymore!
Config 2021
ConFig 2021 Reflections
If you missed Config 2021, Kaila Shatosky provides a great recap of a few of her favorite talks.
Episode 395: Config 2021
In this week’s episode of Design Details, Brian Lovin and Marshall Bock share their reactions to everything announced at Figma’s Config 2021.
Day 1 Closing Keynote: Designing the Biden-Harris campaign
“During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Biden-Harris design team designed everything from JoeBiden.com, to the campaign plane, to the stage design — all in one Figma file, all together. Robyn Kanner, Creative Director of the Biden-Harris design team, shares how they managed the pressure and speed of the historical digital-first election, through the lens of her personal reflections: on leaning into serenity, why letting go of ownership led to stronger communication, and the way it changed her own relationship with design.”
Q&A with Robyn Kanner
Figma started new Q&A series in their blog. To start, they asked Robyn Kanner 25 quick questions.
Using Figma
Blending Brand and Product
Josh Mateo, Design Systems Lead at Netflix: “Effectively scaling and extending a brand into a company’s product is a common challenge I’ve noticed throughout my career. If we deconstruct visual attributes and technical constraints into scalable elements, we can begin to influence the brand from the product, or vice-versa.”
Reverse layers order in Auto Layout
I shared a tip on using 180° rotation to reverse layers order in an Auto Layout frame, so the first layer is top- or left-most.
Draggable windows
Adam Ruthendorf-Przewoski with a new episode of his “The Fun of Iterating with Figma” series.
Our Favourite Figma plugins for 2021
The team at Mono shares their most-used and favorite plugins for 2021.
Figma tips: Building flexible components using the “slot” method
Designer Advocate Luis: “We often find ourselves creating lots of different variations of similar components, this can be tedious and difficult to maintain. Using a technique called “slots”, we can swap out components very easily from a single component.”
Creating design system tools for non-designers
In this episode of “Coffee with Charli”, she talks with Ramy Majouji, product design lead at Glossier. Together they show off some unique ways Glossier uses their design system to create tools for folks outside of product design.
Vectary 3D Figma Plugin
“The Vectary 3D plugin for Figma is adding the missing third dimension to your 2D designs. Place your Figma design into a predefined 3D mockup or your custom 3D element. Set your desired perspective in 3D and place the result into the scene with one click.”
User Testing with Figma and Maze
This free video lesson from the online class “Remote User Testing With Figma & Maze” covers an intro to Maze and setting up the Maze test prototype, so it’s a great start for everyone who wants to see if Maze & Figma are the right tools for them.
Double-clicking on the edge of a text box
Joey Banks on a shortcut to set a text block resizing mode.
You should always name your layers
Cmd‑R is one of the most underrated shortcuts.
Masking explained in 59 seconds
Miggi from Figgi shows how to use masks in Figma. Don’t miss Part 2!
FigJam
Layout FM: Designing FigJam
“This week we are joined by Jenny Wen and Kee Yen Yeo from Figma to talk about the behind-the-scenes of designing FigJam.”
Introduction to FigJam by Figma
A quick FigJam demo by Sebastiaan Schillebeeckx.
FigJam toolbar demo
Miggi from Figgi aka Professor Figma shows the FigJam toolbar.
Resources
Keyboard Shortcut Annotation
Annotate your mockups with a nice-looking keyboard shortcut illustration. It’s super easy to customize and includes all the most common special character keys.
Interactive Coin Flip
Gleb Sabirzyanov made a cool isometric coin animation entirely in Figma.
Brand Sprint
“A template for the GV Brand Sprint – a workshop format conceived at Google Ventures and well documented by Jake Knapp. In 3 hours or less, you get a very good picture of a brand, its vision, future and challenges.”
Backstage
Figma Keyboard
A few of the Figmates collaborated on building a completely custom Figma keyboard. See the design details on the Community – I wish it was available for sale!
From Musical Theater to Account Executive with Katie Jane Bailey
Katie Jane Bailey is a senior enterprise account executive at Figma and the star of Figma In Quarantine musical. In this episode of Hey Salespeople, hear about the parallels between musical theater and sales, advice on pivoting different careers into sales, and how to reframe restrictive thinking around sales methodologies.