Branching is now available to teams on the Organization plan. It was announced in April at Config 2021, but according to Rasmus Andersson, it’s been in the making for 5 years. The lack of branches was the main issue when my team switched from Sketch and Abstract to Figma in 2018, so I hope it will become available on the Professional plan one day.

Figma’s Director of Product Sho Kuwamoto shares some of the challenges of building branching.

John Fuetsch, Software Engineer at Figma, explains why they’ve built branching. ​“Branches are exploratory spaces that enable designers to try new ideas without changing the main file until they’re ready and approved. They are especially useful for preserving the integrity of approved designs, while making room for work that’s experimental or iterative in nature, like contributing to a design library and previewing work for stakeholders.”

“In this tip, learn about maintaining component libraries and enabling more seamless contributions from consuming design teams by using Branching.”

All talks are already available in Schema’s event account. (NB: if you didn’t attend the conference, you’d need to create an account first.) Alternatively, I’ll share the direct YouTube links below with some relevant resources.

Sho Kuwamoto, Director of Product at Figma. ​“Join Sho as he kicks off our inaugural Schema conference with opening remarks. Tune in for his reflections on how design systems have grown and changed and how us system designers can help shape a better, more inclusive future.”

Jen Yee and Luca Orio, Netflix. ​“Jen and Luca will reveal how systems and freedoms can coexist and how your design community can thrive at any stage. Letting go of consistency and control might sound scary, but embracing a culture of context and trust is the key to supporting an ecosystem where collaborative creation can truly fuel innovation.”

Jan Toman, Productboard. ​“Not sure where to start? Get your libraries off the ground by learning how to craft UI kits that designers will love using. We’ll dive into building flexible components, aligning their API with code, and dealing with changes as the design system evolves.”

Jennie Yip, Atlassian. ​“Design systems have evolved into robust ecosystems of interconnected tooling, documentation, conceptual models, and more. We’re excited to bring you on a journey to celebrate and reflect on the past decade as we shift our mindsets, apply systems thinking, take on the monster of scale, and embrace the complexity of ​“platform.””

Jeremy Dizon, Runi Goswami, Michael Yom, and Joanne Deng from Lyft. ​“Like any product, a design system is only as useful as it is usable. In this session, the Lyft Design Systems team will share the end-to-end resources that enable their system users to build consistent, quality products and features at scale. We’ll learn about their most resilient processes, their past mistakes, their new-ish contribution model, and more.”

Jina Anne, Ivy Wang, and Ainsley Wagoner from Asana. ​“This talk is about how the Asana Design Systems team uses design tokens to get designers and engineers working at the same level of abstraction. We will talk about how Figma’s design system tooling, along with design tokens, enables us to make the redundant parts of designing more streamlined so that we can focus on solving design problems.”

Kelly Gorr and Prasanna Gunuru, Microsoft. ​“Figma is a powerful design tool that is used by many designers across Microsoft. Building custom Figma plugins can unlock new capabilities, resources, and shortcuts that are tailored to enhance design processes. Kelly and Prasanna take you through what it’s like building Figma plugins and how they are used at Microsoft.”

Ivy Knight and Rody Davis, Google. ​“Material You is enabling a new level of individuality across interfaces. But how does dynamic color interact with the distinct brand expression in your design system? In this session, we’ll dive into the NEW Figma plugin for generating dynamic color schemes and see those changes reflected throughout your app’s UI.”

“Figma’s Designer Advocate Luis Ouriach has been collecting your questions in chat and online. He’ll dig in with our speakers to tackle design systems questions big and small.”

Hugo Raymond, Burberry. ​“How can we better understand the context of our Design Systems among our broader product teams? Join us to learn Burberry’s approach, including how to best work with engineers, standardise and understand shared context for reusability, and how to think about both strict and loose frameworks of adoption.”

Heldiney Pereira, Monzo. ​“We all spend time reflecting on structures of design systems, but have we invested enough understanding the governance of those systems? Join Heldiney as he digs into the different models available to run and scale design systems globally.”

“Ever wonder how other companies set up their Figma files? Joel Miller from Figma will take us behind the scenes and provide tips, tricks, and examples you can implement today.” See also a Twitter thread with all the resources that Joel shared.

Patrick Banta compiled a list of design system resources recommended during Schema.

Pretty cool to see the backstage of the production. Schema wasn’t a typical Zoom conference.

According to the results of Jamstack Community Survey 2021, 60% of respondents use Figma, and its satisfaction score is 8.8. Look at the chart to see how incredible this score is when compared to other design tools. There is nothing like this in any other category either (except for IDEs, but that’s not a specific tool.)

“Creating components with automated sizing behavior saves a lot of time during the process. They also let us think more like a developer that has to implement the real application. That is why it is essential to master Constraints and Auto Layout in Figma.”

As always, Rogie’s tweets gather a lot of fantastic replies.

Joey Banks with an excellent suggestion on how to bring designers and engineers closer.

Jan Toman (see his Schema talk above) with a few recommendations for design system maintainers.

Anton Lovchikov shares his approach to structuring pages in the Figma file.

Bonnie Kate Wolf suggests using Unicode emojis in front of the variant name for a quick preview.

Impressive hyper-realistic prototype of a calendar made with interactive components.

A cool recreation of PS5 UI with Smart Animate.

If you liked Jan Toman’s talk at Schema, check out this one as well.

Luis shows how to create styles at rocket speed using batch renaming and the Styler plugin.

“Join to hear from Lauren Duxbury and Julie Lee at Honeywell about how they evaluated, tested, and advocated for a design system that works for designers.”

“Today’s launch of Anima 5 marks another milestone on our mission to perfect the design-to-development workflow: truly functioning Material Design in Figma and Adobe XD. This means you can now build prototypes using actual code-based Material UI components.”

Bravo Studio is a platform for building mobile apps from Figma prototypes without writing code. The new version adds a whole new set of functionalities. See also their new demo video.

Beautifully crafted open-source 3D icons by Vijay Verma. Kudos for licensing it as CCO.

Isometric 3D constructor for creating complex scenes easily in Figma.

The template from Furquan Ahmad to help you structure your portfolio presentation and talk about yourself and your case studies with ease. 

”Warp your designs using Smudge, Twirl, Bulge, Pinch, Arc, and Free Transform tools. This plugin brings the typical warp tools known from other vector apps to Figma.“

Such a great idea and a useful plugin for optically scaling and distributing logos! Check out Cory Etzkorn’s video demo.

“For the infrastructure team, the question was: how do we empower our product engineers to build these real-time views easily, while abstracting away the complexity of pushing data back and forth? To provide a general solution to this fundamental business need, we developed LiveGraph, a data fetching layer on top of Postgres that allows our frontend code to request real-time data subscriptions expressed with GraphQL.”

“Kyle built Figma’s sales team from scratch. When he joined, company culture was established and PLG was already driving hypergrowth. Learn how Kyle integrated sales into Figma’s culture, and got the whole company cheering for the next gong.”