Design System + Tokens. Material You UI Kit. Beautiful Shadows.
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App Updates
Design needs everyone: new plans for companies that design together
Amanda Kleha, CCO at Figma: “We want Figma to be a place where everyone can participate in the design process together—from brainstorm to build—while also making it easy to stay organized and flow from one task to the next. That’s why we’re excited to launch new FigJam plans, as well as a new Figma Enterprise plan, to welcome more people into the design process.”
Introducing FigJam paid plans and Figma Enterprise
FigJam is out of beta with new paid plans for teams that want to collaborate without limits. Figma also got a new Enterprise plan “that provides the structure, granular controls, advanced security, and support that organizations need to support all the groups that take part in their design process.” (The Twitter thread by Sean Chin provides a curious look behind the scenes on how long it takes to ship something like this.)
Prototyping fixes
A few bug fixes related to prototypes.
Updates to the FigJam plugins and widgets menus
…and a few improvements to the plugins and widgets menus in FigJam.
What’s New
Dwell’s creative secret weapon? Swarming.
“Dwell has a well-established culture of company-wide brainstorming, a concept they call “swarming.” During a swarm, someone will post a topic that they want to discuss into a Slack channel, throw in a FigJam link, and invite anyone from the company that is interested to join in and “swarm” on that subject. Swarms last around 10 to 15 minutes and can range from discussing a magazine feature idea to hammering out the details of company goals and editorial strategy.”
Using Figma
Making Design Systems flexible with Design Tokens
Jan Six, creator of the powerful Figma Tokens plugin, joined forces with Marc Andrew, creator of a massive Cabana design system, to rebuild the system using tokens. It’s still an early version, but Jan talks about some of the benefits of the new approach in this article.
Figma quick trick: components with customisable contents
Anton Kuznetsov wrote a detailed guide to creating components with customizable content, better known as “slot components”. This approach is the best way to reduce the number of detached instances in your project.
Update and test components
“How can we update and test our design system components in Figma? With branching, we have a space to explore updates in our main library files while keeping the source of truth intact. And, with Swap Library, we can quickly change what libraries are being used in a file. Let’s take a look at how we can use these features together to iterate and test our components.”
‘Access Code’ breakdown
Yet another great tutorial breaking down the process of creating an artwork by Fons Mans.
Resources
Material You & Android 12
The biggest Material You UI kit with more than 1,000 components, built to perfectly replicate the real-world, official Material Design Components library for Android 12.
Design Handoff Library
Four templates that may help ease the pain of the design handoff process — a table of contents, detailed specs, mockups, and flow templates.
Plugins
Beautiful Shadows
The plugin allows you to create beautiful shadows by simply dragging a “light source,” which casts a shadow from selected elements. The shadow effect is achieved by layering and easing multiple drop-shadows to create a skeuomorphic shadow umbra and penumbra.
Automations for Automator
A curated list of automations for Jordan Singer’s popular Automator plugin.