Config 2022 dates. Base components. Spacing.
Hello from the snowy Northeast! Congrats to the Figma team for finally getting @figma handle on Twitter. It’s a small thing, but I’m sure it took a lot of work to make it happen. (I have a glimpse of hope that one day Twitter will let me take over someone’s suspended @figmalion account.)
The community has been talking a lot about the mechanics of components — usability vs. maintainability, managing spacing, and automating grunt work. Lots of good topics in this issue!
— Eugene
P.S. Thanks to Webflow for sponsoring Figmalion again! Don’t miss the official trailer — it’s a dramatic masterpiece.
Sponsor
Figma to Webflow
Never before done by Webflow University, this new course teaches you how to build a site — a good one — from scratch. Dropping February 1.
App Updates
32 Little Big Updates
A large shipment of small updates to Figma and FigJam. The community file is the best way to learn about all of them with demos and examples, but see also the blog post with a list of updates.
Keep track of secret teams while keeping their contents private
“Now Org Admin will also see secret teams in the Teams tab of the admin console, so they have visibility into all the teams that exist in the organization. The content in secret teams will remain secret to its members.”
What’s New
Config 2022
Config is back on May 10–11, 2022! The call for speakers is open until February 20th, 2022.
Macintosh 128K
Macintosh 128K was released on January 24th, 1984. Figma celebrated the anniversary with a cool Easter egg: create a frame using the “Macintosh 128K” template from the Archive, then switch to the Presentation mode. Also, check out this community file by Keeyen to see how it was made.
Little Big Updates: dispatches from Quality Week
Great stories and reflections from Marcin Wichary on bugs in software. “At Figma, there are many processes and tools to deal with bugs, including recurring Quality Weeks: time dedicated to coming together within a product team, and to fixing bugs that might otherwise get forgotten by time, bugs that deserve extra investigation, and bugs that stretch the traditional definition of bugs.”
This reminded me of another great post, “Debugging Misadventures: Down the Rabbit Hole”, by ex-Figma engineer Jamie Wong that I shared a while ago.
Text baseline alignment is coming to Auto Layout?
Don’t know how reliable this leak is, but that would be sweet! There is also another rumor on text truncation.
Using Figma
Base Components
Joey Banks shared a change in his approach to base components earlier this month on Twitter, and now goes into more details in his newsletter. I often end up with too much complexity because of over-reliance on base components, so this is a piece of welcome advice.
Overengineering Variants
Hosts of the Design Details podcast share tips for crafting component variants to avoid the dreaded variant-explosion problem.
Everything you need to know about spacing & layout grids
A really detailed guide by Molly Hellmuth on spacing and layout grid best practices based on Material Design, Bootstrap, and Figma.
Pros and cons of Spacer components
Dan Hollick shares a few pros and cons of using Spacer components vs. Auto Layout.
A few lesser-known Figma tips
The design team at Medium shares a few of their favorite Figma tips.
11 super-simple tips to help improve your Figma workflow
A collection of tips to help improve your design workflow in Figma.
Plugins
Automator
Automator – the most discussed plugin lately – is now available to the public. For a limited time, it’s $29 per year for personal use. See Issue #52 for some examples of what it can do.
Figma plugin sneak peek
New Storybook plugin for Figma that lets you connect variants to stories.